



TWENTY-FIFTH 
ANNIVERSARY 

OF 

CLARK UNIVERSITY 

WORCESTER, MASS. 

1889-1914 



WORCESTER, MASS. 



A 







Twenty-Fifth Anniversary 



Of 



Clark University 

WORCESTER, MASS. 



1889-1914 




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The purpose of this booklet is twofold: — First, to carry to 
the alumni, who were unable to attend the celebration, the 
greetings of the University, to tighten the bond of union 
which draws us together in mind if not in body, and to renew 
by silent toast our allegiance to Clark University, — " Vivat, 
crescat, floreat ": Second, to again call to the attention of 
her friends what Clark University signifies, how she has 
builded for the future and what is needed morally and physi- 
cally for the fructification of her plans. 

John S. French. 



1889 - 1914 

CLARK UNIVERSITY 
TW^ENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 

The celebration of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Clark 
University took place in Worcester on Saturday, March 28th, 
1914. The nature of the celebration and the order of events 
are shown by the programme, which follows: — 




1889-1914 

CLARK UNIVERSITY 
TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 

MARCH THE TWENTY-EIGHTH, IN THE YEAR 

ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED 

AND FOURTEEN 

10.30 A. M. 

MEETING OF ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 
ASSEMBLY HALL 
MAIN BUILDING 

1 P. M. 
LUNCHEON AT PRESIDENT HALL'S RESIDENCE 

3 P. M. 

PUBLIC MEETING IN THE GYMNASIUM 

MAIN BUILDING 



CLARK UNIVERSITY 

PROGRAMME 
SELECTION 

ACADEMIC PROCESSION OF TRUSTEES, FACULTY 

AND ALUMNI 

PROFESSOR WILLIAM E. STORY, MARSHAL 

INVOCATION 

REVEREND AUSTIN S. CARVER 

(Audience Standing) 
WELCOME 

DOCTOR JOHN S. FRENCH, PRESIDENT OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 

HYMN 

GOD OF OUR FATHERS, WHOSE ALMIGHTY HAND 

ADDRESS 

PRESIDENT G. STANLEY HALL, PH. D., LL.D. 

ADDRESS 

DOCTOR HERMON C. BUMPUS 

The Ideal of a University 
HYMN— RECESSIONAL 

THE SON OF GOD GOES FORTH TO WAR 

SELECTION 

5 P. M. 

INSPECTION OF BUILDINGS 

6 P. M. 

ALUMNI BANQUET, HOTEL BANCROFT 

9 P. M. to 11 P. M. 

PUBLIC RECEPTION BY THE TRUSTEES, FACULTY AND ALUMNI 

BALL ROOM, HOTEL BANCROFT 



ACTION OF THE ALUMNI 

The celebration assumed a special significance through the 
active part taken by the Alumni in organizing and putting 
into effect the plans for the celebration. 

The preliminary steps were taken by the Alumni at their 
annual dinner in February, 1913, at which time it was voted 
to make formal request to the Trustees and Faculty that the 
details of the celebration be placed in their hands and in 
anticipation of the granting of this request committees were 
appointed to consider the plans in detail. It was made 
evident, at once, that the celebration should single out as 
its distinguishing feature the inauguration of a new era of 
active co-operation with the University, of her friends and 
Alumni in the maintenance of the high standards set by her 
in the past. This line of action took shape in the formula- 
tion of two well defined plans of procedure: — first, the organ- 
izing of a permanent Alimmi Association; second, the 
establishing of an Alumni Fellowship Fund. 

To these two ends the committee .devoted themselves. 
They' drew up and submitted to the Alumni for criticism 
and suggestion a tentative constitution. This constitution, 
with modifications, was adopted at the meeting of the Alumni 
and a copy is here inserted. 



CLARK UNIVERSITY 



CONSTITUTION OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 
OF CLARK UNIVERSITY 



ARTICLE I 



NAME 

This association shall be known as the Alumni Association of Clark 
University, Worcester, Mass. 

ARTICLE II 

OBJECTS 

The objects of the Association are, — to estabUsh and maintain a pro- 
fessional and social intercourse between its members and to promote the 
welfare of the University. 

ARTICLE III 

MEMBERSHIP 

Section 1. The members of the Association shall consist of three 
classes: Active, Associate and Honorary. 

active members 

Section 2. All persons having received the degree of Doctor of Phil- 
osophy in course from the University shall, by virtue of this attainment, be 
admitted to active membership. 

Any other person who shall have completed a period of residential study 
in the University may be elected to active membership by a three-fourths 
vote of the Council at any regular meeting on the written nomination of 
two active members. 

associate members 

Section 3. Any person who shall have completed a period of resi- 
dential study in the University equivalent to one academic year shall be 
entitled to associate membership, and shall have all the privileges of 
active membership except voting or appointment to office. 

honorary members 

Section 4. Any person other than those provided for in the two pre- 
ceding sections may, by unanimous election of the Council, be made an 
honorary member. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY / 

It is to be understood that the Council is limited in its choice of hono- 
rary members to individuals who shall have rendered distinguished ser- 
vice to the University. They shall be entitled to the privileges of the 
active members but shall be exempt from all fees and assessments. 



ARTICLE IV 

OFFICERS 

Section 1. The officers of the Association shall be chosen from the 
active members and shall consist of a President, a Vice-President, a Perma- 
nent Secretary, a Secretary, a Treasurer, and a Council. 

They shall be elected by ballot at the time and place provided for in 
Article V and shall, the Permanent Secretary excepted, hold office for one 
year, or until their successors are chosen. The Permanent Secretary shall 
be elected for a period of five years. All the officers shall be eligible to 
re-election. 

PRESIDENT 

Section 2. The President, or, in his absence, the Vice-President, shall 
preside at all sessions of the Association and at all meetings of the Council 
of which he shall be Chairman ex-officio. 

His other duties shall be those ordinarily pertaining to his office. 

PERMANENT SECRETARY 

Section 3. The permanent Secretary shall be the secretary of the 
Council. He shall be the custodian of all documents and records per- 
taining to the policy and general administrative work of the Association. 

He shall keep a record of the Alumni. 

He shall receive all communications addressed to the Association for 
general consideration and shall properly attend to the same. 

He shall attend to all business not otherwise provided for. 

TREASURER 

Section 4. The Treasurer shall assess, receive and invest funds, as 
may be directed by the Council, and he shall annually present to the 
Association an account of the receipts .and investment of such funds. 
No expenditures of the principal in the hands of the Treasurer shall be 
made without a three-fourths vote of the Council at a regular meeting, 
and no expenditures of the income received shall be made except by 
direction of the Council. 

SECRETARY 

Section 5. The Secretary shall keep the records of the meetings of 
the Association and shall, after approval, give the same to the Perma- 
nent Secretary for permanent record. 



CLARK UNIVERSITY 



COUNCIL 



Section 6. The Council shall consist of eleven members, and shall 
be constituted as follows: — the President, the Permanent Secretary, the 
Treasurer ex-officio, and eight elected members to serve for two years, 
four to be elected each year. Not more than two of the elected members 
of the Council shall be from any one department of the University. Six 
members of the Council shall constitute a quorum. The Council shall 
meet immediately before an aimual meeting of the Association. 

The President may call a meeting of the Council at his discretion, and 
shall do so on the written request of three of its members. 

The Cotmcil shall be the executive board of the Association and no 
business shall be transacted by the Association which has not first been 
referred to or originated with the Council. 

The Council shall appoint at each regular meeting the following sub- 
committees which shall act subject to the appeal to the Council until 
their successors are chosen: — 1, on Members; 2, on Alumni Fellowships; 
3, on Finance; 4, on Nominations. 

ARTICLE V 

MEETINGS 

The Association shall hold meetings as follows: — 

A business meeting at which all business of the Association shall be. 
transacted including election of officers. 

A general public session conducted in accordance with a fixed program. 

These meetings shall ordinarily be held in conjunction with the Com- 
mencement Exercises of the University. 

Other meetings shall be held as directed by the Council. 

ARTICLE VI 

ACCOUNTS 

The accounts of the Treasurer shall be audited annually by Auditors 
appointed by the Council. 

ARTICLE VII 

AMENDMENTS 

Any part of this constitution may be amended by the concurrence of 
three-fourths of the active members present at a regular business session 
after notice of not less than six months. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 9 

In accordance with the provisions of the constitution the 
following officers were elected : — 

President 

DR. JOHN S. FRENCH 
providence, r. i. 

Vice-President 

DR. CHARLES H. THURBER 

boston, mass. 

Treasurer 

DR. JAMES P. PORTER 

worcester, mass. 

Permanent Secretary 

DR. JOHN C. HUBBARD 

worcester, mass. 

Secretary 
DR. ELNORA W. CURTIS 

WORCESTER, MASS. 

Members of the Council for Two Years 
DR. FRANK B. WILLIAMS 

WORCESTER, MASS. 

DR. ROY T. WELLS 

BOSTON, MASS. 

DR. HERMON C. BUMPUS 

MADISON, WIS. 

DR. FREDERICK C. FERRY 
williamstown, mass. 

Members of the Council for One Year 
DR. ALBERT P. WILLS 

NEW YORK, N. Y. 

DR. FLETCHER B. DRESSLAR 

NASHVnXE, TENN. 

DR. A. CASWELL ELLIS 

AUSTIN, TEX. 

DR. HENRY H. GODDARD 

VINELAND, N. J. 



10 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

The appeal for an Alumni Fellowship Fund, based on the 
recognition of the necessity of some material inducement to 
attract to the University men of high quality and strong 
promise who give evidence of capacity, thorough mentality 
and personality to attain to the high standard set by her 
Faculty and thus to maintain the rich traditions of Clark's 
past and present, met with a ready and hearty response, 
with an immediate pledge amounting to over $10,000, which, 
it is hoped, will reach the amount set, $100,000, the income 
from which will make ample provision for the purposes above 
set forth. 

The formal exercises of the afternoon were held in the 
gymnasium of the main building at three o'clock. 

The academic procession of Trustees, Faculty and Alumni, 
led by the Marshal, Dr. William E. Story, was one of the 
longest and most imposing in the history of the University's 
public functions. They occupied the entire platform. 

Dr. Garver opened the exercises with prayer: — 

"Almighty God, Who dost ever regard us with favor even 
though we know Thee not as Thou art, we turn to Thee 
first of all to-day in glad remembrance and praise. Where 
there is truth and righteousness, there Thou art openly 
manifest; where there is love of truth and right there Thou 
art secretly worshipped; so that the place whereon we stand 
is holy ground and a sanctuary of Thy presence. 

" We desire to thank Thee for the tender and consecrating 
memories that throng the mind as we come back to this shrine 
of truth to revive old friendships and renew our pledges of 
fidelity to great ideals. 

" We thank Thee for the prosperity that has attended 
this institution through these years, and for the hope of 
greater things yet to be. 

" We thank Thee for the honored examples of those who, 
patient in study and earnest in teaching, have here upheld 
lofty ideals of learning and scholarship and service; and for 
the noble work of those who inspired and trained here have 
carried the spirit and fame of this university to other places, 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 11 

and have kindled lights that fling back from afar the bright- 
ness of their source. 

" Glad and grateful we celebrate together this day of 
rejoicing, with tears and honor for those whom sickness 
prevents from meeting with us. 

"Abundantly hast Thou blessed us; we dare not ask for 
greater favors. Only continue Thine inspirations unto us 
and help us be faithful to the heavenly vision. 

" Upon us all gathered here, and upon the whole fraternity 
of Clark men everywhere, may Thy constant benediction 
rest. Amen." 

Following the invocation, Dr. John S. French, President 
of the Alumni Association, gave the 

ADDRESS OF WELCOME 

Twenty-seven years ago, on these grounds, there was laid 
the cornerstone of a building designed to house a university. 
To-day in that building we are celebrating the passing of 
the first quarter century in the life of that university. 

Founded on the belief that the summum bonum of life, be 
it spiritual, intellectual, or material, is based on the search 
for truth, and dedicated to the principles that this highest 
of attainments is achieved through scientific research and 
productive scholarship, the life of Clark University has been 
one continuous demonstration of unquestioned faith in and 
unswerving loyalty to the precept that, among others, breadth 
of thought, impartiality of observation, freedom of action, are 
component forces whose resultant is expressed with suc- 
cinctness by the university motto, " Let there be light." 

The struggle of Clark University to maintain her standards 
in spite of the conflictions of a somewhat doubting profession, 
augmented by the successful pursuit of her leaders, these 
captains of intellectual industry, who with philosophy and 
science as guides are penetrating the labyrinth of nature's 
riddles and showing, without question, the supremacy of 
scientific order over the mere chance of empiricism, these 
have cast an effulgence on her history as bright as the noon- 
day sun and have made a chapter in that great study of 



12 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

humanity which even the dismal flood of a dark age of irre- 
sponsibiHty cotild not blot out. 

It is indeed a splendid thing for us here gathered to pay 
tribute to the memory of those who have gone before us and 
to decorate with the symbolism of victory those who are 
carrying on the warfare to emancipate mankind from the 
pernicious vagaries of mediaevalism and give to posterity 
the priceless heritage of a new freedom secured through the 
conquest of nature thus made tributary to the will of man. 

If, however, the function of this meeting were one of 
commemoration only, if we were gathered here simply to 
recall past achievements and to worship at the shrines of 
our master saints, the significance of this celebration would 
indeed be superficial and its purpose transitory. It is stag- 
nancy when one accepts in contentment the achievements 
of the past as sufficient unto to-day; nor should one limit 
himself to the narrow confines of the present for such fatal- 
ism is anarchistic. Not as an idle boast but as a dynamic 
possibihty should we pause for reflection and with reverence 
for her noble past, renew our allegiance to the work in which 
she stands a pioneer. 

Let us pHght our faith in her future as once she showed 
her faith in us; let us be of good courage and of strong hearts 
in the hope of her continued greatness; and with a love which 
transcends words, let us magnify her and exalt her name 
together. And so as the embodiment of that most wondrous of 
triunes, " Faith, hope, love," let us all, you her neighbors, our- 
selves her offspring, pledge fidelity to her service, and as she 

" — Goes forth to war, 

A kingly crown to gain; 
O God, to us may grace be given 

To follow in her train." 

Nor should we look upon this as a task only in so far as 
a duty is a task and let this be measured by devoutness, for 
devotion to duty is one of the evidences in the final test of 
engendered ideals and principles without which no institu- 
tion can endure. What a vista may thus be opened to us, 
verily a promised land teeming with opportunity, but gained 
only by consistent effort. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 13 

And here one might pause to ask, " Is it all worth while ? " 
To which comes the unqualified answer, " It is worth while 
for that above all else is worth while which has as its function 
making each generation better fitted to take up its problems, 
fearlessly, honestly, forcefully, than have been those that 
have come before." 

It is fitting, then, for us here assembled, to rededicate this 
university to the advancement of science on its loftiest plane 
and to pledge ourselves anew to the cause so magnificently 
begun. 

With this in mind, therefore, it is with the greatest of 
fehcity that we invite you to participate in these festivities 
and welcome you as co-operators in the inauguration of a 
new era in the life of this, a mecca of scientific achievement. 

HYMN 

God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand 

Trumpets before each verse 

God of our fathers, Whose almighty hand 
Leads forth in beauty all the starry band 
Of shining worlds in splendor thro' the skies. 
Our grateful songs before Thy throne arise. 

Thy love divine hath led us in the past, 
In this free land by Thee our lot is cast; 
Be Thou our ruler, guardian, guide and stay. 
Thy word our law. Thy paths our chosen way. 

From war's alarms, from deadly pestilence, 
Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defense; 
Thy true religion in our hearts increase. 
Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace. 

Refresh Thy people on their toilsome way, 
Lead us from night to never-ending day; 
Fill all our lives with love and grace divine, 
And glory, laud and praise be ever Thine. 

Introducing Dr. Hall, Dr. French said: — 

Clark University, whose twenty-fifth birthday we are 

celebrating to-day, stands as one of the landmarks which 

give luster to the fair name of Worcester. Worcester — rich 

in the manifoldness of its enterprises, far-famed as the home 



14 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

of skilled industry, pre-eminent as a center of learning, 
supreme as the birthplace and center of radiation of a world- 
wide university. The guiding hand of genius which charted 
this institution's course and has, from her inception, shaped 
her destiny is still at the helm and our prayer to-day is that 
many years to come shall find him, with that same humility 
which marks greatness, presenting new fields for investiga- 
tion, inspiring his disciples with high ideals, fostering the 
spirit of a scientific nobility. Shall we all stand and do honor 
to our beloved President Stanley Hall. 

The ovation to Dr. Hall as he rose to speak was a 
splendid tribute to him ; it was one of the distinct evidences 
of the day, of the genuine devotion of Worcester's people to 
Clark University and her leader. 

After the applause had subsided Dr. Hall gave his 
address on 

CONTEMPORARY UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 

The story of Clark University during the quarter century 
of its existence, the close of which we celebrate today with the 
alumni, under the inspiring guidance of Dr. French and his 
committee, has in some respects no parallel in academic his- 
tory. Especially the first few year^ of our annals have both 
brighter and darker pages than I can find in the records of 
any university. Thirteen of us instructors had taught or 
taken degrees at the Johns Hopkins, and we left that institu- 
tion, which had added a new and higher story to the American 
university when it was at the very apex of its prosperity and 
hence were naturally inspired with the ideal of taking the 
inevitable next step upward, as indeed were all the other 
members of our original faculty, which was remarkable, if not 
unprecedented here, in its quality. Of the no less notable 
original Board of Trustees, every member of which has now 
passed away (while death has not once invaded the ranks of 
our professorial corps), the triumvirate, Hoar, Devens and 
Washburn, who stood nearest to Mr. Clark, as his executive 
committee of all work, estimated the resources that were ulti- 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 15 

mately to be at our disposal at from eight to twelve million 
dollars, and very likely more. 

I was at the outset sent on an eight months' trip to Europe, 
with several score letters of introduction, including one from 
the national government which gave me access to the inside 
workings of Kultus Ministeria and university circles and 
archives, so that my trip constituted a pedagogic journey I 
think almost without precedent. Twenty-five years ago these 
very weeks I was on this unique mission and was surprised to 
find the most eminent men of learning in Europe profoundly 
interested in it, and so lavish with their time, sympathy and 
counsel. I was entertained by Lord Kelvin, Pasteur, Helm- 
holtz, Jowett, and some scores of others of the greatest living 
leaders in scientific thought, went on a trip of inspection of 
German universities as the guest of the Prussian Minister of 
Education, von Gosslar, and, perhaps most embarrassing of 
all, was taken in state by General Trepanoff on a visit to the 
two great Russian military schools near St. Petersburg, in 
each of which an all day's program of military evolutions had 
been arranged for my special edification, was a guest of honor 
at a meeting of Swedish universities, etc. My instructions 
from Mr. Clark had been to see everything and every insti- 
tution possible, collect building plans, budgets, administration 
methods of every kind, and find out a few of the best men 
who might be willing to come to a new institution here, but 
to engage no one but to be ready to negotiate with them later. 
The amazement to me was how lavish everybody was of ad- 
vice, how cherished and often how elaborate were the ideals 
of university men, many if not most of whom seemed to have 
imagined installations of their own departments rivaling not 
only Bacon's House of Solomon, but sometimes almost sug- 
gesting apocryphal vision. From my voluminous notes of that 
trip could be compiled ideals lofty, numerous and far-reaching 
enough to inspire all the universities of the world for a cen- 
tury, and to organize a new one here for the conduct of which 
ten times ten million dollars would be sadly inadequate. 

They gave me plans of the then new four million dollar 
university building at Vienna, of the new Sorbonne at Paris, 
its rival, of the complete new university which Bismarck had 



16 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

established at Strasburg to show Elsass-Lorraine, which Ger- 
many had just annexed, and to show especially France, what 
the Teutons really meant by higher education, of the newly 
built university at Kiel, in which Germany sought to impress 
upon the Scandinavians the same object-lesson, in her newly 
acquired Schleswig-Holstein, and which was designed to com- 
pete with the neighboring university of Copenhagen, just as 
she rehabilitated Koenigsburg to impress the same lesson upon 
the nearby Russian rival institution at Dorpat. I was given in 
some cases the secret etat and the unprinted Statuten of the 
universities, — all this until I felt an almost Tarpeian embar- 
rassment, especially as I was in nearly all these places utterly 
unknown and an object of interest solely because of my unique 
mission. I found young professors prone to see visions, and old 
ones to dream dreams, each for his own department, that all 
a king's ransom would be inadequate to make real. Of all this 
I wrote Mr. Clark and my colleagues here awaiting the great 
instauration. The harvest home-coming, with all these sheaves 
of suggestion and inspiration, marked the zenith of great ex- 
pectation and of hope tiptoe on the mountain-top. For years 
and sometimes even yet, European savants who first heard of 
Worcester from me and have since known it only as the home 
of Clark University, seemed often, to our great embarrass- 
ment, to assume that many or most of the ideals that we then 
discussed together are now realized in this golden land of 
promise, and rank us far above our own modest sense of our 
deserts. 

If I came home slightly intoxicated with academic ideals, so 
v/ere all of us in some degree, according to our temperament, 
but a reality that was sobering enough soon confronted us. I 
cannot enter here upon the details of our disappointments, 
culminating in the tragic hegira to Chicago and elsewhere of 
three-fifths of our faculty. If ever there was an academic 
tragedy, a via crucis, a veritable descent into Avemus, it was 
here. The story of these years has been carefully written out, 
with everybody heard from, and all the divergent interpreta- 
tions of what occurred and what it meant faithfully set down, 
and filed away in our archives, and perhaps after another- 
twenty-five years or yet another, it may be published. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 17 

Suffice it to say that although we started with far less than, 
justifiably or not, we had hoped for, we began the fourth year, 
1893-94, with only about one-fourth of the total annual re- 
sources that we had the first year. In the seven years that 
followed, down to the founder's death in 1900, we had for all 
purposes only 4% of the income of $600,000 plus that of 
$100,000 more for the library, that is, less than $30,000. 
Several of us who remained here were tempted by larger 
ofifers to what seemed more promising fields, but, on the whole, 
and I believe no one regrets it, we elected to stand by here. 
These lean years were, however, characterized by two features. 
First, they were years of unique harmony. There was no 
friction. We stood and worked shoulder to shoulder. And 
this is of prime importance in a small institution like this. In 
a great university discords can and always do occur, but here, 
where discontent in any department disturbs the whole institu- 
tion, accord is one of the prime necessities. The other feature 
of these years was intense devotion to research and to teaching, 
and our productiveness, whether compared with our numbers 
or our income, has never been greater, and indeed, I wonder 
if that of any other institution has been greater relatively to 
its size. Perhaps the alumni of these days were, and will ever 
be, a little nearer to the center of the hearts of those who went 
through them, and it is significant, and can be no cause of 
jealousy to others, that it is they who are leading in the epoch- 
making activities that center about to-day and mark this as 
the date from which henceforth our alumni will be a potent 
factor in our future history. Their newly and well organized 
support, their enthusiasm for the spirit of research, which is 
our inspiration, will henceforth greatly reenforce all our best 
efforts here and be an inspiration to our future development. 

With the dawn of the century came also the college, which 
has given us 51 students who have already taken degrees in 
the last eight years, although it has its own independent pur- 
pose. As to it, we are brethren, children of the same parent 
or, to change the figure, a married couple, and unlike married 
couples we can never be divorced, so that he who would make 
discord between us is an enemy to both, and every man who 
helps the other is a friend to both. Any encroachment of each 



18 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

Upon the other's domain or any effort to profit or exalt the 
one at the other's expense, is bringing discord into sacred 
family relations. Our two-in-one or dual unity is unique, 
delicate, imposes new responsibilities and presents also in- 
spiring possibilities for a new solution of some of the 
highest academic problems. I think we can truly say that 
each is now a noble stimulus to the other. We are proud 
of the college and we are so just in proportion as we know 
and understand its problems, aspirations and achieve- 
ments. We are proud of the name and the work of its 
first great president and of the rare men he brought here, 
whose growth in knowledge and power, together with 
those of the college alumni whom they trained in his day, 
constitute his living monument, and we of the university 
salute the college colors in our decorations to-day, and hail 
with pride and give our heartiest Godspeed to the second presi- 
dent of the college, who is not only carrying out the ideals he 
inherited of a three years' course of non-athletic and citizen- 
building functions, but is going further and making the college 
a leader and light among others in the land. Would some one 
would offer a prize for some pregnant symbol, seal or even 
slogan or song typifying this unique conjunction, which col- 
lege and university should forever unite to use ! Could we not 
fitly commemorate this occasion by a new resolve that there 
shall never be tension or strain between us, and that a policy 
of mutual help shall henceforth animate us both ? 

In the recent voluminous Ptterature on colleges, so much 
under discussion of late, we have several characterizations of 
the ideal college professor, and these agree pretty well. He 
must be a good man, a model citizen, a gentleman and a 
scholar, a teacher born, made or both, tactful, and in close per- 
sonal relations with his students, anxious and able to teach 
them all they are capable of learning in his department, a man 
whose character will be normative and influential for good, 
fitting students, not for the university, nor even for profes- 
sional or technical careers chiefly, but for their work in life in 
general, and evoking all their powers. Noble as are all these 
traits of nature and nurture, and rare as is their combination, 
and exacting as are the conditions of instruction and parental 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 19 

care, many college professors go further and are not even 
content with the useful work of making text-books but really 
add to the sum of human knowledge by their researches, and 
it is a satisfaction to us that so many of those here are with 
and of us in this respect. 

For the university professor research is his prime function. 
He must specialize more sharply, must not only keep in con- 
stant and vital rapport with everything that every creative 
mind is doing in his field the world over, but he must hear and 
lay to heart every syllable that the muse of his department 
utters to every co-worker everywhere, and best of all, she 
must also speak new words through him. There is a vital 
sense in which he stands in closer relation to his co-workers 
in other lands than to his colleagues in the same institution. 
The chief momentum of the vital push-up in him impels him 
to penetrate ever a little farther into the unknown, to erect 
some kiosk in Kamtchatka, where he can wrest some new 
secret from the sphynx, who has far more to reveal than all 
she has yet told. Whenever he grows impotent to do this, 
he becomes only an emeritus knight of the holy ghost of sci- 
ence. Studies of the age when men in various departments 
do their best work show that scientists are the oldest of all 
the creators of culture values on the average, but that there 
is more individual variation, so that they cross the dead line 
both older and younger than any others. It is one of the 
hardest things in the world to be and remain a productive in- 
vestigator. There are so many journals and books to be read, 
so many and constant alterations and adaptations, needful to 
press the questions we ask nature home and to get an answer, 
such changes of method and apparatus, so much that was 
yesterday new and will tomorrow be obsolete if we would not 
abandon what Janet calls " la fonction du reelle," and take 
some kind of flight from reality and its ever pressing devoir 
present. But if research is hard and the life it demands beset 
v/ith dangers, so that many are always falling by the way 
without giving any sign of their demise to outsiders, this 
work has its supreme reward, and I cannot believe that there 
is any joy life has to offer quite so great as the Eureka joy of 
a new discovery. 



20 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

Not only this work itself but its conditions are amazingly 
complex, unstable, and ever shifting. Just at present it seems 
to me that academic unrest was never quite so great the world 
over, and that the near future never promised so many im- 
portant changes. Some abuses, great and small, have of late 
grown rank and demand remedy. Certain vicious tendencies 
must be corrected and reforms made. Bear with me if I ask 
you to glance briefly at a few of these. 

Beginning with the Teutonic countries, since 1907 the assist- 
ant professors and docents have developed a strong inter- 
institutional organization against the head or full professors. 
The unprecedentedly rapid growth in the size of the student 
body everywhere has resulted in what Eulenberg calls a lush 
" Nachwuchs " of assistants of all grades. Statistics show 
that on the average the Extraordinarii or assistant professors 
receive this appointment at the age of 37, at an average salary 
of $523, and remain in this position nearly 20 years, attaining 
an average salary of $1,200, before promotion, at the average 
age of 57. These now constitute, with the docents, about half 
the teaching personnel of German institutions, and they often 
have neither seat nor vote in the faculty and little par- 
ticipation in the corporate life of the institution. In the 
municipal university which opens at Frankfurt next fall 
it was even proposed to have a president of the American 
type, to safeguard the assistants against the oppression of the 
full professors. A few years ago Tiibingen, and last year 
Ziirich, radically revised their ancient statutes to remedy these 
evils, and the projected university at Hamburg will go yet 
further. The two new universities in Hungary, at Pressburg 
and Debreczen, and the private one at Hongkong, — these grant 
more liberty and show more appreciation of the enthusiasm 
and ideals of the younger members of the faculty. Even 
students in Germany have caught the spirit of unrest, if not 
revolution, and now have a strong inter-institutional organiza- 
tion, and their pamphlets are boldly demanding better methods 
of teaching, printed outlines of professors' lectures, are trying 
to develop a sentiment that no instructor shall ever repeat in a 
lecture anything he has ever published, are calling for more 
options, especially more freedom of choice in the selection of 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 21 

subjects for their theses and more meaty topics for them that 
do not make their work ancillary to that of the professor, 
more personal rights to what they produce or discover in 
them, a longer period of hospitieren or of trying out each 
course before they finally sign for it, more and better semi- 
naries with better tests for admission, more practical courses, 
better access to books, journals and library facilities generally, 
less over-crowding and more elimination all the way from 
Ober-Sekunda in the Gymnasium to the doctorate, better 
social opportunities, dormitories, more personal contact with 
the professors, less restrictions on their personal liberty, re- 
form of the corps, honor system, and the Mensur. This un- 
rest, although it seems ominous to conservatism, cannot fail 
to prevent waste and bring reform. 

In the English universities agitation has had many recent 
expressions, from Lord Curzon's demand for reforms in 1909 
on to Tillgard's of last year. Here the protestants grant that 
these institutions still breed the flower of national life, the Eng- 
lish gentleman, but demand better library facilities than the 
individual colleges, with their wasteful duplication, afford, and 
especially more of what the critics so strenuously insist is still 
lacking and that parliament should enforce, namely, more 
teaching and research. Thus the deepening sense that some- 
thing rather radical must be done seems now crystallizing into 
just what that something should be. In France and in Russia 
unrest is greater and reforms are more loudly demanded. 

In this country academic unrest has been largely directed 
against organization and administration. In old days the 
college president, though he usually taught, was supreme and 
autocratic, and as leading institutions grew and he ceased to 
teach, the concentration of power in his hands became al- 
together excessive. The foundation of new institutions, the 
Hopkins, and a little later Stanford and Chicago, greatly 
augmented his power under our system. He had to deter- 
mine the departments, select professors, fix their status, 
build, organize, represent the institution to the board and 
public, perhaps the legislature, plunge into the mad, waste- 
ful competition for students and money, lay supply pipes to 
every institution that could fit. Never was the presidential 



22 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

function so suddenly enlarged nor its power so great and un- 
controlled as a decade or two ago. Even the University of 
Virginia and other southern universities, which had only a 
president of the faculty, elected by its members, fell into line, 
and a reaction toward democratization, which in its extreme 
form seemed sometimes almost to adopt a slogan, " Delindus 
est prex," was inevitable. In the Cattell movement abundant 
incidents of arrogance and arbitrary, if not usurped, power 
were collected, and it was even insisted that although charters 
or conditions of bequest, to say nothing of American tradition, 
would have to be reversed, it was urged that the president 
should be only chairman of the faculty, elected perhaps annu- 
ally by them, and in the literature of this movement we find 
occasionally the radical plea that some or all of the powers of 
the board should be turned over to the faculty, who should at 
least be given control of the annual budget. More lately the 
movement of protest here is against the autocracy of the dean, 
whom the president had created in his own image, and who 
sometimes exercises a power that he would never dare to do, 
and who in large institutions has constructed a mechanism of 
rules, methods, procedures, standards, which have almost 
come to monopolize the deliberations of the Association of 
American Universities, which fortunately cannot prescribe or 
legislate for its individual members. University deans have 
often created rules which they themselves can suspend for 
individuals, and this has greatly augmented their power. It 
is they largely who have broken up knowledge into standard- 
ized units of hours, weeks, terms, credits, blocking every short 
cut for superior minds and making a bureaucracy which re- 
presses personal initiative and legitimate ambition. Just now 
perhaps we hear most remonstrance against head professors 
and statements that the assistant professors and younger in- 
structors in their departments are entirely at their mercy, that 
they are burdened with the drudgery of drills, examinations, 
markings, all at small pay, while their chiefs take the credit, 
so that the best years of the best young men, who are the 
most precious asset of any institution, or even of civilization, 
are wasted. Indeed we have vivid pictures of the hardships 
which often crush out the ambitions of young aspirants for 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 23 

professional honors and tend to make them, if they ever do 
arrive, parts of a machine with no ideals of what sacred 
academic freedom really means. Happily now the best senti- 
ment of the best professors now organizing inter-institutionally 
to safeguard their own interests and those of their institutions, 
stands for a most wholesome and needed movement which is 
sure to prevail. 

So far I submit to you and to my colleagues that Clark 
University, not through any wisdom or virtue of its president, 
although perhaps a little through the fact that he is a teacher 
and does not spend all his time in organizing, but owing to its 
small size, its unprecedented absence of rules, its utterly un- 
trammeled academic freedom, is to-day in a position to lead 
and not follow in the wake of this movement. No one here 
wants autocratic personal power but we do all want the best 
attainable, whatever it is. Each department here is almost as 
independent and autonomous as if there were no other. We 
have no deans, few assistant professors, and so no tyranny of 
departmental heads, no complaints on the part of students, as 
in Germany, that we are not doing the best we can for them, 
so that this world-wide movement for academic reform we 
ought to consider as a great and new opportunity to us all, 
trustees and faculties, at this psychological moment to realize 
our own advantage, and to carefully look over our present 
system and see if we cannot use this opportunity to begin the 
new quarter century with our lamps retrimmed and burning 
bright, and alert and profiting by every suggestion that the 
academic Zeitgeist is now murmuring like the Socratic daemon 
in our ears. 

Let us, then, look our present situation and ourselves frankly 
in the face. With the indefatigable labors of Senator Hoar in 
securing a just and legal execution of Mr. Clark's difficult will, 
labors which some of his colleagues in the board thought 
almost justified us in calling him our second founder, with a 
board more active and interested in our affairs, external and 
internal, than ever before, as their cooperation in this com- 
memoration typifies, with our funds better invested and yield- 
ing a trifle more than they have ever done, with an admirable 
library, the creation, body and soul, of Dr. Wilson, who has 



24 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

the greatest genius of friendship of us all, with the re-estab- 
lishment of the department of chemistry, which was dropped 
for a few years, with the increase of salaries, from time to time, 
as far as means permitted, inadequate though most of these 
still are compared with the increased cost of living, with more 
departments and professors and instructors, we seem to have 
entered upon a settled period of prosperity and growth that 
promises that the next quarter of a century will far transcend 
the past, and now that all the perturbations of the first forma- 
tive era are over, we can look forward with confidence that 
the university will go on in the general direction it has already 
so faithfully held to during its period of storm and stress, 
in saecula saeculorum. 

We have no greater distinction than that which has come 
from always preferring quality, attainment and ability to num- 
bers, and that these standards may never be lowered is the 
most heartfelt wish and prayer of all of us. My greatest joy 
today is in the spontaneous testimonials of appreciation and 
loyalty of our alumni in leaving their work and coming here, 
at this most inconvenient season and sometimes from a great 
distance, and giving us or wording their cordial personal greet- 
ing and Godspeed, and even in contributing, not out of their 
abundance, for most of them are moderately paid professors 
like ourselves, but from a sense of gratitude and as a token of 
good will, to the fellowships which constitute our very greatest 
need. 

Turning to the future, the changes we need here are largely 
but by no means wholly in harvesting what we sowed at the 
start and assiduously cultivated ever since, for which the time 
is now ripe. It would be preposterous to lay out our course 
now for another quarter century. We must always maintain 
keen orientation in an ever wider and more intricate field. 
To my mind there should always be a specialist here and 
in every institution in what might be called the higher ped- 
agogy and in academic history, whose business it is to keep 
keenly alive to all that is doing in academic life the world 
over. Especially now, when these changes are so rapid, some 
one must spend much time in the outlook tower, and I would 
even hazard the strong opinion that had foreign institutions 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 25 

had a specialist in the conning tower, intent on studying the 
ever changing signs of the times and trained in academic 
statesmanship, many, if not most, of the errors that have 
caused our own and foreign universities so much waste of 
energy in recent years, might have been avoided. 

The time is at hand when university rectorates, presidencies, 
chancellorships, or whatever their name, can no longer be filled 
by any professor or even outsider who can secure , election, 
but will require men who, whatever else they are or know, are 
experts in the history of the higher culture and its institutions, 
from the four great academies of antiquity down, who know 
the story of mediaeval universities of the church and then of 
the state, of the guilds of scholars, the rise and present status 
of learned societies and academies, the great reforms of the 
past and the yet more significant reconstructions now evolving, 
the governmental patronage of learning and research, from 
the day of the Medici down to contemporary legislation for 
higher institutions, national and state, present-day centraliza- 
tion and the efforts against it in France, the many universities 
lately established by colonial policies, the world-wide movement 
of university extension. He must suggest ways and means to 
his colleagues for achieving their own even if unconscious 
ideals, help free investigators to be the supermen they are called 
to be, each in his own way, have a minimum of arbitrary au- 
thority and a maximum of faculty co5peration, catch and sym- 
pathetically respond to and find his chief inspiration in the 
fondest, highest, if secret, aspirations of each of his co-workers, 
who must not be content with the stale ways of the present per- 
fervid competition for dollars and students or with the mere 
horizontal expansion, the multiplication of machinery or de- 
vices for efficiency of factory type, but study precedents, cul- 
ture trends, and believe profoundly in the power of faculty 
democratization and do his utmost to develop it, regardless of 
his own personal or official prestige or authority. On the con- 
tinent, mayors are trained professional experts, and cities vie 
with each other competitively for their services and find they 
can Vv-ell afford to do so, for their special training means 
vast economies. Universities in this country if not the world 
over, are more nearly ready than are cities to profit by this 



26 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

example, and their gain thereby would be even greater. 
Twenty years ago Professor Paulsen of Berlin, the best repre- 
sentative of the higher pedagogy I plead for which that country 
has yet produced, warned German universities of the very 
dangers which have now waxed so grave, and with which 
they are battling, and the presidents here have only too good 
reason to look either with jealousy or with hope, according 
to their temperament, upon the now rapid addition of the 
higher story of academic pedagogy to the old schoolmaster's 
pedagogy of the grammar and high school, and development 
in this direction is another of the pregnant signs of the future. 

Think of the changes since we began. Many special lines 
of research have their own institutions where little or no 
formal teaching is done, like astronomic observatories, the 
Rockefeller Institute, Wood's Holl, Cold Springs Harbor, the 
Carnegie Institute, with all the possibilities of his will, the 
question of a national university, always with us, just now 
of the Fess hundred million dollar type, to be devoted chiefly 
to research, the enormous expansion of teacher-training in 
nearly every higher institution of this country, a movement 
that is almost without precedent in its magnitude and sud- 
denness, the augmented stress laid upon practical applications 
of pure science, — these constitute a new environment, as 
also do the active and well organized but silent field agencies 
of most large institutions both to recruit students, with com- 
peting agents at the ear of every boy who thinks of going 
on, and also to place their graduates in every academic 
vacancy. These are problems to which a presidential or other 
agency must give great and growing attention and for which 
the president of the future must have special training, and 
in which also the faculty must share the burdens of adminis- 
trative responsibility since questions must often be decided 
one way or the other while those who determine them are 
uncertain, themselves, so that criticism accumulates. 

As to professors, the best of them make an almost unpre- 
cedented sacrifice and could have achieved the highest suc- 
cess in financial, professional, political (witness President 
Wilson) and other lines. They know the price they pay and 
are willing to pay it, but must have as their compensation 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 27 

the boon of security and liberty to teach and investigate freely 
what and how they will. The university professorate, too, 
means not only the cult of specialization but of individuality. 
Even idiosyncrasies are to be not only tolerated but respected 
and perhaps welcomed. The university should be the freest 
spot on earth, where human nature in its most variegated and 
acuminated types can blossom and bear fruit. The factory 
type of efficiency has no place there. Each must make him- 
self as efficient as possible but in his own way and inde- 
pendently of all external circumstances, and without the mul- 
tiplication of machinery, so that an able organizer with nothing 
to do but to administer might prove an unmitigated curse to 
all the best things a professor and even a university stand for. 

Thus now I, who with one tiny exception have never, dur- 
ing all these twenty-five years, to a single citizen of Worcester 
hinted at a donation, will say a word which I wish 
all would hear and consider. We greatly need and shall 
always need more funds to strengthen existing and to found 
new departments. Though we bear another name, we are, 
fellow citizens, your University of Worcester. In all the 
spheres we touch, we have spread the name and added to 
the fame of this Heart of the Commonwealth. If we had 
ten million dollars more, not one of us would gain personally 
but should only have more work, for we are only administer- 
ing the highest of charities. 

If you doubt that this is the highest, listen to the con- 
clusion of the report of the most elaborate parliamentary com- 
mission Great Britain ever knew, of forty volumes and nearly 
nineteen years in the making, covering all British charities 
of every kind, more than twenty thousand in all, which is : 
that of all objects of charity, the highest education has proven 
wisest, best, and most efficient of all, and that for two chief 
reasons, first because the superior integrity and ability of the 
trustees who consent to administer such funds, together with 
the intelligent appreciation of those aided by them, combine 
to furnish the best guarantee that they will be kept perpetually 
administered in the purpose and spirit of the founder whose 
name they bear; and second, because in approving higher 
education all other good causes are most effectually aided. 



28 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

Since the first endowment of research in the Greek academy, 
porch, grove and garden, from which all our higher institu- 
tions have sprung, thousands of spontaneous free will offer- 
ings have borne tangible witness to the sentiment so often and 
vividly taught by Plato, that in all the world there is no 
object more worthy of reverence, love and service, and none 
that it pays a civilization better to help to its fullest develop- 
ment than well-born, well-bred, gifted, trained young men 
who desire to be masters in an age when experts decide all 
things, for in them is the hope and the future leadership of 
the race, and to help them to more of the knowledge that is 
power is the highest service of one generation to the next. 
And how this has appealed to all ages! Oxford and Cam- 
bridge have 1, 800 separate endowed fellowships and scholar- 
ships, to say nothing of the smaller exhibitions. Leipzig has 
407 distinct funds, the oldest dating 1325, and wherever the 
higher academic life has flourished we find scores of memorials 
bearing the names of husbands, wives, parents, children, and 
providing for students of some special class, locality, or estab- 
lishing or benefiting some new department or line of investi- 
gation, theoretical or practical; and now that the rapport of 
business, government, and all social and cultural institutions 
was never so close, all who give greatly and wisely, or who 
make or suggest bequests, have a new noblesse oblige to con- 
sider. 

Cold facts and figures finally show a few things that I beg 
you all to ponder now. These are, that compared either with 
the size of our faculty, the number of departments, or our 
annual budget, we have fitted more men for higher degrees, 
seen more of them in academic chairs, where they are found 
in all the leading institutions of the land, including some dozen 
of presidencies, first and last, published more original contri- 
butions which seek to add to the sum of the world's knowl- 
edge, have a larger proportion of members of our faculty 
starred as of first rank in Cattell's census of the competent, 
had closer personal and often daily contact with students, and 
given more individual help outside of classes, had more aca- 
demic freedom (for no one in our history has ever suffered 
in any way for his opinions), had more autonomy in our 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 29 

departments, each of which is a law to itself, had less rules 
and formalities of every kind, and had a president who was 
less president and more teacher, good or bad, spent less time 
in devising ways and means of seeking contributions from our 
friends here, advertised less and avoided all publicity more, 
until now, when I am, jubt for this one moment, throwing all 
our traditions of silence, modesty, absence of boasting about 
our work, to the winds. In these respects we exceed any of 
the other twenty-one institutions of the Association of Ameri- 
can Universities, 

This Clark University means, has stood for and will for- 
ever stand for, and this is why we all love and have put the 
best twenty-five years of our lives into her service and wish 
we all had another quarter of a century to serve her better, 
This is what brings you alumni back with your offerings, 
your loyalty and hearty good wishes. This is the university 
not made with hands, eternal in the world of science and 
learning. Clark University is not a structure but it is a state 
of mind, for wherever these ideals reign Clark men are at 
home, and all who have them are our friends and brothers. 

It is this ideal that sustained us in our darkest days and 
now lights up the future with a new glow. Is there any joy 
of service to be compared with that of the investigator who 
has wrung a new secret from the heart of nature, listening 
when she has whispered a single syllable of truth unuttered 
before, who has been able to add a single stone to the great 
temple of learning, the noblest of all the structures ever reared 
by man? Is there any more religious calling than thus think- 
ing God's thoughts after him, and proclaiming the gospel of 
truth to confirm faith, prevent illness, deepen self-knowledge 
and that of society, industry, give us mastery over the physi- 
cal, chemical, biological energies that control the world, and 
develop mathematics, the language of all who think exactly, 
a language which all sciences tend to speak in proportion as 
they become complete? This is why research is religious and 
the knowledge gained in the laboratory to-day may set free 
energies that benefit the whole race to-morrow. Is not an 
institution devoted, heart and soul, to this sort of work, the 



30 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

best thing any community can have in its midst, and should 
it not be cherished as the heart of this " Heart of the Com- 
monwealth ? " 

Dr. French introduced Dr. Bumpus in the following 
words : — 

I take keen pleasure in presenting to you as the second 
speaker of the afternoon Hermon Carey Bumpus, first to 
receive in course from this University the degree of Doctor 
of Philosophy, and first of her Alumni to be honored by her 
with the degree of Doctor of Laws, an administrative expert 
who has contributed much to make the University of Wis- 
consin the world's leader in the application of science to 
every industry within its borders. The subject of his address 
is, " The Ideal of a University." — Dr. Bumpus. 

THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY 

Your Program Committee has given me the subject, 
" The Ideal of a University; its Purposes and Ambitions," 
and has expressed the hope that what may be said will serve 
as a call to high standards and as a summoning from false 
gods, if false gods exist, to the end that the people here 
assembled may be given a clear statement of the proper 
function of a University. 

It is pleasant to engage in this task because the ideals, 
the purposes, and the ambitions of Clark University as 
announced twenty-five years ago constituted a call to high 
standards; a call that was clear and irresistibly attractive; 
a call that was not issued by false gods; and because the 
call of to-day is for even loftier ideals, higher purposes, and 
greater ambitions. Indeed, no student trained at Clark 
University would admit that an ideal attained is aught but 
a means for elevating other ideals, that any good purpose 
can be fixed, definitely limited and impossible of improve- 
ment, or that an ambition can be in the highest sense worthy 
if it is irresponsive to collateral changes. Graduates of 
Clark believe in progress, in the process of evolution, and 
therefore our present ideal of what universities should be is 
based upon our impression of universities as they are, tem- 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 31 

pered, by what we feel, they should become — it being under- 
stood that any ideal may lie just beyond the horizon of 
possible reality. 

The university owes its origin and its earlier development 
to a single purpose — a place for instruction. It has recently 
become a dual institution — a place for instruction and in- 
vestigation. It is destined to become also a place de^'^oted 
to public service. 

In the twelfth century men gathered at Bologna and 
Paris by the tens of thousands that they might listen to 
teachers. In the thirteenth century teachers at Oxford and 
Cambridge drew throngs from England and the Continent. 
Harvard College in the seventeenth century, Yale, Princeton, 
Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Brown in the eighteenth, and 
hundreds of colleges and universities during the nineteenth 
century, all had teaching as their primary purpose. Thus 
for a long time universities have been instructional institu- 
tions, places where people convened that they might receive 
information about other people and places. Professors 
occupying positions in these institutions were revered, not 
for what they had themselves done, but because of their 
success in relating what other people had done. Teaching 
was the original and is now the essential work of nearly every 
American university. Enormous endowments have been 
created for teaching and it is safe to say that legislative 
bodies have been accustomed to appropriate more liberally 
for education than for any other purpose. Moreover, the 
educational process is the monopoly of ■ no political party: 
Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, and Socialists all 
unhesitatingly endorse its principles and liberally put the 
principles into execution. The sums appropriated are spent 
with greater freedom and the results obtained are passed 
over with less scrutiny than attaches to any other class of 
public expenditure. 

At the present moment there are over two hundred thou- 
sand students attending American universities and colleges 
and all of these are receiving instruction. A professional 
staff of thirty thousand is employed in this process and the 
actual cost reaches the huge sum of fifty-three millions 



32 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

annually. It is a noteworthy fact that this enormous piece 
of work — one might call it an industry — has grown from a 
small beginning and without any very intimate direction on 
the part of the nominal governing boards. It has resulted 
rather from the directive influence of the teaching body, and 
the fact that this influence has been generally recognized, 
speaks well for the wisdom of the several administrative 
bodies and serves as a fine example of what can be accom- 
plished through co-operative effort. Indeed, the governing 
boards of our institutions of learning, working under no 
central organization, have been singularly isolated and con- 
sequently they have been forced to rely upon the technical 
knowledge and judgment of the respective instructional 
staffs. It is safe to say that the innumerable problems com- 
mon to all educational institutions have never been discussed 
at any general conference of governing boards, and that 
throughout the entire history of education in America a 
congress of the trustees of universities and colleges has never 
been convened and a federation of these officers has, so far 
as I know, never even been suggested. Furthermore, it is 
unlikely that any managing board is intimately acquainted 
— I say intimately — with the instruction that is being given 
in the institution under its immediate control and it is ignorant, 
as a body, of the kind of instruction that is being given in 
other similar institutions. This is perfectly natural because 
the members of the average board of trustees do not convene 
frequently and their positions do not imply this kind of 
responsibility. Having been trained in, or at least having 
taken what might be called their graduate work in, the prac- 
tical school that is located outside of college walls, they are 
more disposed to interest themselves in the business, rather 
than the educational, side of university administration. When 
they have come in contact with those who are absorbed in 
the teaching side, the points of view may not always have 
coincided, but friendly toleration has been the almost invari- 
able rule and prevailing custom is certainly establishing a 
precedent that is in no way unfavorable to the teacher. I 
doubt, moreover, that there is any serious disposition on the 
part of governing boards toward the autocratic usurpation 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 33 

of privileges that have been the long established preroga- 
tive of the teaching staff, and I doubt further that there is 
any real danger that academic freedom is in jeopardy. 

A position on the governing board of any American uni- 
versity is a distinct honor, but it is wrongly conferred if 
conferred for this purpose and wrongly accepted if accept- 
ance does not carry with it a sense of obligation. Attend- 
ance at an occasional board meeting does not discharge this 
obligation, nor does an idle contribution to carry out some 
personal whim, nor does the criticism of imiversity manage- 
ment nor the fuUsome and thoughtless acclaim that is con- 
doned under the term " college spirit." 

With increase in the amount of business to be done and 
with educational problems requiring technical knowledge and 
exhaustive study, the obligations assumed by the governing 
boards of our American colleges and universities are of 
increased importance. These boards are not only responsible 
for the wise expenditure of a million dollars every week — 
they are beginning to be held responsible for the quality of 
material that is being given to more than two hundred thou- 
sand men and women. 

Within the past decade the duties and responsibilities of 
the directing boards of commercial and industrial organiza- 
tions frequently have been the subject of state and federal 
legislation and there is now a universal demand that the pub- 
lished announcements of business transacted in universities, 
as well as in commercial enterprises, be clear and clean-cut 
statements of transparent fact, measured with mathematical 
accuracy and expressed in terms that are easily intelligible. 

But how much more difficult of understanding and of an- 
nouncement are the intangible facts of educational success 
and failure that we know must occur in every university, 
but which it is impossible to express by any known mode of 
mathematical tabulation, and how impossible is it for our 
governing boards promptly to become acquainted with these 
facts under the present plan of organization. 

It is here, then, that I would like to suggest an adminis- 
trative ideal — 

Since the efforts above outlined — ^the efforts of our govern- 



34 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

ing boards on the one hand and the efforts of our educational 
staffs on the other — have resulted in such splendid achieve- 
ment, and since it is impossible that the individuals on our 
governing boards, as now generally constituted, will them- 
selves ever acquire an intimate knowledge of the specific 
educational processes and educational needs of their insti- 
tutions, and since it is certain that governing boards desire 
to have this knowledge, and since there is no reason why- 
instructional officers who possess this knowledge should be 
disqualified from being members of a governing board, and 
since the entire drift, of institutional management is toward 
democracy, why not bring these two agencies together and 
give the faculty representation on the board, and, indeed, 
we might go further and give the board representation on 
the faculty. We would thus generally recognize a partnership 
that we know has long existed, we would forestall misunder- 
standings, and two forces would be brought together — the 
one familiar with the work of the other — the one adding to 
the strength of the other — and both striving with common 
ambition for a common purpose; the development of the 
co-operative life of the university in order to secure the 
highest grade of educational efficiency. 

Considering the organization of university work from 
another point, is it not true that while it is desirable that 
the faculty have representation on the administrative board, 
the faculty has suffered, and suffered seriously, from foreign 
work that is consuming time and energy that ought to be 
devoted to duties of a different, if not of a much higher, 
order ? Why a professor that has largely delegated the 
custody of his own children to a life-mate, that nature obvi- 
ously intended to perform this function, should busy himself 
with the custody of the children of others, assume that this 
is a part of his professional duty, and jealously defend his 
prerogative, is a biological anomaly that is difficult of ex- 
planation. Nevertheless, a ruinous amount of time and 
tissue is expended in the average faculty and committee 
meeting on questions of student discipline, delinquency, and 
dishonesty — subtleties that have been under perennial faculty 
discussions, but thus far without any substantial restdt. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 35 

There is not a university man present who does not know 
that the professional efficiency of several of his colleagues 
is being impaired by this kind of work. Indeed, at this 
moment there arise in our minds case after case where men 
have invested in years of training with the intent of devot- 
ing their lives to research and then dissipated their intel- 
lectual fortune on profitless university routine — a dissipa- 
tion generally condoned but as sad in its results as though 
the intellectual powers — the mental growth — of the victim 
had been inhibited by a drug. 

The average university has within its instructional staff 
a series of committees, ranging from a dozen to a score. 
These cover student registration, student attendance, stu- 
dent organizations, student advice, student examinations, 
student athletics, student publications, student loans, stu- 
dent interests, and many other subjects. Why should a 
professor of psychology attend to the registration of stu- 
dents ? (A five thousand dollar man do the work of a five 
hundred dollar clerk.) Why should a physician stop his 
professional work in order to pass on excuses for absences ? 
What connection is there between bacteriology and student 
organizations ? If it is necessary to have a committee of 
the faculty to give general advice to students, why not 
establish a department composed of experts ? Why should 
athletics, after consuming a large share of the student's 
time and energy, place a heavy levy upon the intellectual 
resources of the faculty and thus remodel high class intel- 
lectual machinery to serve sordid ends ? Concerning student 
loans— having been a professor myself, I can well under- 
stand that the various members of an impecunious university 
faculty can speak with the full knowledge of personal experi- 
ence on the subject of loans — but why invidiously appoint 
a special committee for this purpose when any individual 
professor might do equally well ? This condition of affairs, 
the evils of which are pretty generally recognized, has arisen 
from several causes: 

First and foremost — Often the professor is really inter- 
ested in the personal welfare of his students and this indulg- 



36 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

ence is pleasurable to him, profitable to the student and sub- 
ject to general approval. 

Second — Within the past generation the multiplication of 
student activities has introduced a most perplexing academic 
problem, and in default of some better or more convenient 
agency, the faculty has been assigned, or rather has assumed, 
general jurisdiction over this new, and at present little under- 
stood, phenomenon. 

Third — In recent years, in all commercial, industrial and 
social activities, there has been a prevailing tendency toward 
organization. The university faculty would naturally re- 
spond to this general movement, but not having the power 
to create administrative positions de novo, its response has 
taken the peculiar form of assigning certain of its members 
to perform certain administrative tasks — but without realiz- 
ing the enormous cost. 

Fourth — While the mental processes of the student are 
acqtiisitive, those of the teacher are distributive. The aim 
and purpose of the professor is to impart, his habit is to 
give, and he gives his time and thought and energy without 
stint and without regard to values. Quite unconsciously, 
administrative officers have taken advantage of this tendency 
and assigned duties to those who are willing to carry them, 
without realizing the inevitable consequences. Is it not 
often a fact that the young instructor who is useful in the 
facility receives promotion at the expense of the one who is 
useful in his profession ? And if this is generally true the 
university is its own enemy and is defeating its avowed pur- 
pose. Let us be thankful that it is not true of Clark University. 

We all admit — everyone admits — that the most precious 
possession of any university should be its faculty — a collec- 
tion of men selected with care, each presumably absorbed 
in his chosen field of study and all zealous for the welfare of 
the institution they serve. The faculty is the university, 
and everything that encourages, assists or facilitates its 
members in the work that they have been assigned to per- 
form and that encourages their research work, has its imme- 
diate effect upon academic efficiency. The faculty payroll 
absorbs more than one-half of the resources of any well 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 37 

conducted institution, and having made this apportionment, 
it is good business to see that the remaining cost is so applied 
to the needs of the first as to yield the highest grade of ser- 
vice, and in the largest possible amount. 

Our ideal university, then, should be so conducted that 
the members of the faculty would be relieved of unnecessary, 
unessential and disturbing duties that add nothing to pro- 
fessional efficiency and might rather be performed by officers 
specially trained and efficient in this kind of secondary work. 

Moreover, when a young man of fine training and high 
promise has been added to the instructional staff, an ideal 
university should recognize the nature of its acquisition and 
the responsibility it has assumed. If the young man is worth 
engaging, he is likely to suffer a distinct wrong if he is assigned 
work other than that for which he had prepared, he will suffer 
a distinct wrong if he is denied the physical equipment neces- 
sary for his intellectual growth, and the university will suffer 
a distinct wrong if, as a result of its unreasonable demands, 
there grows into the permanent staff a stunted mind, a 
strangled will and a disappointed soul. 

The national lust for magnitude and the passion to be 
identified with new ideas not infrequently have had a para- 
lyzing, rather than a stimtdating effect upon university 
development. To quote from Wall Street: American uni- 
versities are "long" on ideas and "short" on support. 

Life may take its beginning in a vigorous germ, but growth 
cannot continue except through the natural processes of 
nutrition and metabolism. Therefore, in planning an ideal 
university and in order to produce the best instructional and 
research growth, crowding must not occur. Before new 
appointments are made, attention must first be given to 
questions of support, of nutrition, and to the production of 
a promising inflorescence and an abundant fructification of 
the good things that have already been established before 
yielding to the importunities of those who wotdd forever 
enlarge the academic garden by transplanting therein educa- 
tional exotics, the iiltimate horticultural value of which is 
entirely problematical. 

Never was there a time when tradition and long estab- 



38 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

lished custom have received less consideration than at the 
present. Connected doubtless in some way with the rise 
and domination of the inductive sciences, with the univer- 
sal tendency to investigate everything and take nothing for 
granted, and encouraged by the credit that is justly given 
to the discoverer of new things, society had developed an 
extraordinary appetite for sensations. The ordinary occur- 
rence cannot receive attention in the press unless it is colored 
to the point of the extraordinary; the novel, to be a good 
seller, must deal with extremes; the stage approaches, even 
if it does not transcend, the zone of limitation; modern art, 
dissatisfied with fact, has adopted the extremes of fancy; 
even the man of science, during " Convention Week," is 
unnerved to meet the scrutiny of his colleagues unless he 
has with him a record that will either establish or disestablish 
some substantial prop of current belief. 

Therefore — Since I have been asked to summon away 
from false gods, it is my duty to warn the unwary of the 
Lorelei of academic sensationalism. Absolute unvarnished 
truth is the only material that should be dispensed by any 
university, and this material should come directly from men 
who are masters in their chosen field and not from profes- 
sional retailers who too frequently are prone to sacrifice 
S-ibstance in their effort to market ornamental containers. 

Of the three divisions of university organization — the 
trustees, the faculty and the students — the trustees and the 
older members of the faculty exercise a conservative or 
reactionary influence, while the younger members of the 
faculty, directing the susceptible student body, are dis- 
tinctly progressive and radical. 

The academic environment in which the student is sup- 
posed to flourish includes these and many other contending 
factors. But, persuaded that in our stage of social evolu- 
tion it is more advantageous for the human being to restrain 
or eliminate certain instinctive activities and to gain, through 
the laborious process of education, certain unnatural acquired 
traits, the student has elected to subject himself for about 
four years to a condition of intellectual forcing, believing 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 39 

that he will thereby most expeditiously produce this much 
to be desired transformation.. 

If there is to be any considerable social evolution result- 
ing from this effort, it is essential that the students should 
possess means for the elimination of undesirable instinctive 
traits, that he should have a high capacity for the acquisi- 
tion of desirable habits and that the instructive influence 
of his temporary environment should be perfectly adjusted 
to his own needs on the one hand and to the needs of society 
on the other. Finally, to add seriousness to the delicacy 
of this adjustment, if there is error on either side, if the 
progressive tendency dominates the conservative to excess, 
or vice versa, there is permanent and irreparable loss, for 
youth once spent cannot be recovered. 

Although it is generally admitted that it is unsafe to 
meddle with established academic custom, there have of 
recent years been, in fact, but few restraints upon educational 
experimentation. Within a generation the method of im- 
parting information has materially changed, courses have 
been made more attractive, the student has adopted many 
secondary sources of assistance that were originally pro- 
scribed and his electives have been multiplied so that it is 
possible for him to find subjects that are attuned to, rather 
than out of harmony with, his native tendencies. Labora- 
tory methods and practical tests have taken the place of 
precision in oral expression, concessions have been made to 
vocational requirements, and many of the old established 
standards have been impaired. While these changes in 
instructional methods have taken place the student has 
vaulted into an arena of social activities, boldly stating that 
the "student life" must not be sacrificed for "student work." 

In the institution that it is my privilege to serve, there 
are more than five hundred different student activities and 
organizations. Of course, many of these are religious, fra- 
ternal, social, and athletic, but they are sufficiently numerous 
probably to provide at least one office for each student. 

Results come quickly in our newer institutions and the 
large, state supported universities of the West, with their 



40 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

rapidly changing boards of regents, their liberal appropria- 
tions, their freedom from the restrictions of tradition, and 
their eagerness to try out new ideas, enable those who are 
disposed to profit by the experience of others to observe 
results somewhat earlier than they would appear in the more 
conservative, endowed, institutions of the East. 

Compared with the graduate of a generation ago, I think 
it fair to say that the university graduate of to-day tends 
to become stronger socially and somewhat weaker intellec- 
tually; that his feeling of personal independence has been 
enhanced; that his regard for authority has been diminished; 
that he has gained in his intimacy with general affairs; and 
has lost somewhat in his reliance upon fundamentals. He 
has a wider general knowledge, which he uses rather play- 
fully, but there has been a reduction in profundity and a 
veiled reticence towards seriousness, and the "good fellow" 
idea has developed at the expense of wholesome intensity 
of purpose. 

The recital of these lists of personal views would have 
no value if we possessed some system that would actually 
measure the capacity of minds and men as they leave the 
university, but we have no such apparatus, and we are 
obliged, therefore, in such matters, chiefly to rely upon the 
crude instrument of personal opinion. 

The most obvious deficiency in the intellectual equip- 
ment of the average student is the embryonic condition of 
his judicial sense. The arrest in the development of the 
sense of proportion, of the power to distinguish between 
what is reasonable and what is unreasonable, what is genuine 
and what is false, and to distinguish promptly between the 
man that is frankly striving for principle and the one who is 
falsely striving for position. A university graduate is not 
sufficiently prepared successfully to meet the strife of adult 
life if he leaves his institution wise with facts and ignorant 
of their application. A student may have acquired a com- 
plete knowledge of what is right, but without any collateral 
development of the moral fibre and physical power sufficient 
to make this knowledge a workable asset. 

One of the reasons for this deficiency in moral virility may 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 41 

lie in the attitude of extreme tolerance that has been assumed 
by many instructors who feel that opposition to any view, 
no matter what its nature, may be construed as an encroach- 
ment upon the domain of academic freedom. Indeed, it 
is quite possible that in our commendable effort to maintain 
the principles of academic freedom, instruction is given with 
such impartial neutrality that a student originally with 
strong convictions of right doing may question their worth- 
iness, and those who have sinister motives may believe they 
receive encouragement even to the point of justification. 

The student that has come under the influence of high 
university ideals, and has reacted properly thereto, should 
have the will to put his acquisitions into immediate use and 
the fortitude to keep them continuously employed. His 
judgment should be kept in good form enabling him quickly 
to arrive at conclusions, independent of plausible arguments, 
and he should be aggressive in putting his conclusions into 
effect, fearless in his attack upon wrong, absorbed in and 
devoted to everything that will increase the interest and 
influence of those of his associates that are disposed to con- 
tribute toward human advancement, and all to satisfy his 
instinctive passion for individual betterment and his ac- 
quired concern for the highest development of the community. 

In the introduction it was stated that although the uni- 
versity was, and is, primarily an institution for instruction, 
of recent years it has become also a place for research; for 
centuries a place for diffusion from the fund of human knowl- 
edge, recently it has become a place where the fund is actu- 
ally increased; long a distributive center, it has now become 
a creative center; the function of the educational middle- 
man has become merged in that of the producer. 

While my theme has led to the pointing out of certain 
reformations — re/ormations — that might add to the efficiency 
of the administrative organization of universities and might 
improve the quality of the educational material given to the 
university student, the creative side of university work is 
by all odds the most attractive to the idealist, and at present 
is a most important influence in molding the destiny of 
American universities. 



42 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

Research easily can get along without being articulated to 
the university, but can the university get along without 
being articulated to research ? The great philosophers, 
scholars and men of science of the seventeenth and eigh- 
teenth centuries — Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Leib- 
nitz, Harvey, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Cuvier, Lavoisier and 
Priestly — were not identified with universities but rather 
with academies of science, and we know that the nineteenth 
century witnessed, in addition to the production of indepen- 
dent workers in science, the initiation of innumerable scien- 
tific undertakings and the establishment of many research 
institutions that had no direct connection with universi- 
ties. Among these may be mentioned our western govern- 
mental surveys, the scientific work and contributions of the 
Smithsonian Institution, the Voyage of the Challenger, the 
work of the Albatross, the Harriman Expedition; and in 
the present century, the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, the 
several voyages to the high latitudes of the north and south, 
the Rockefeller Institution, with its ten millions for research, 
the Carnegie, with its twenty millions, the various experi- 
ment stations, the government laboratories at Washington, 
employing hundreds of men of science; not to mention the 
multitude of state and municipal boards and commissions 
and various industrial concerns, eager to find and give em- 
ployment to investigators of recognized ability and without 
the confining restrictions incident to student instruction. 
The university certainly has no monopoly upon research, and 
the number of investigators that are finding positions where 
they can concentrate their energies and where they are 
relieved of professional duties, is certainly on the increase. 
This may be a good thing for science, but it is a bad thing 
for the university. 

The general scientific awakening that occurred at about 
the time of the establishment of Johns Hopkins University, 
and which was contemporaneous with an increased regard 
for research on the part of other American universities, and 
which led indeed to the unique character of Clark University, 
has done more in one generation toward increasing the effi- 
ciency of university instruction and has accomplished more 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 43 

in the general diffusion of knowledge than the combined 
factors of more instructional effort during several centuries. 
" Let us hold fast to that which is good." 

This agency, the scientific spirit, has placed the older 
curriculum under investigation and has eliminated many- 
courses that were found to be unfit; it has introduced new 
material; it has modified methods, and is transforming the 
art of teaching into a science. It has brought the field of 
exploration into the library and class room and has so in- 
fluenced the student that his highest regard has been trans- 
ferred from the man who relates to the one who constructs. 
This feeling of regard naturally develops into emulation, and 
the graduate thus carries throughout life the feeling of the 
investigator and he infects others with the same spirit. 
Through the influence of research the university has been 
transformed from a finishing school to a beginning school, 
and anything that tends to interfere with this change is 
contrary to the prevailing spirit of progress and repugnant 
to current university ideals. 

Large universities neglect the blessings of their environ- 
ment and are prone to duplicate each other and our smaller 
institutions also lose their individuality in efforts at schol- 
astic mimicry. This is contrary to the spirit of research. 
If an institution is fortunate in having a department that 
is contributing to the fund of human knowledge, that is the 
department that should receive administrative attention; it 
is the department that above all others should be especially 
encouraged, for it is the department that will bring students 
of high grade to the university, that will influence those 
already there, and will give credit and individuality to the 
institution. The influence of one eminent investigator will 
raise any institution above the plane of mediocrity, and 
therefore the encouragement of such a person becomes a 
university duty — claims of others to the contrary not-with 
standing. 

We must not forget that evolution involves four processes : 
" variation," " the struggle for existence," the " elimination 
of the unfit," and " the survival of the fittest." The organic 
types that have left a conspicuous record in the history of 



44 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

the earth are those that have featured the variation factors, 
and the institution that quickly recognizes its fortuitous 
opportunities and acts accordingly — seizing the promising 
and rejecting the unfavorable — ^has before it, the attainment 
of an ideal, and it will not suffer under the regulations of 
natural law. 

Finally, while we are discussing natural law, let us have 
the courage to make another application: It is granted that 
the struggle for existence has proved to be a potent factor 
in the process of evolution. Therefore, when we artificially 
encourage a factor, function or individual with the intent to 
bring about permanent improvement, we must be sure that 
the beneficent results that come from an exhilarating strug- 
gle are not removed. Nature requires that organs be kept 
at work, not below their limit or even to their limit, but 
just beyond their limit — ^indeed, to the point of fatigue. 
Encouraging the investigator does not mean that he should 
be given unlimited rest, relaxation, freedom from obligation, 
or an easy existence, for there can be no evolutionary progress 
under these enfeebling conditions. The directors of certain 
research institutions have discovered, to their disappoint- 
ment, that the uncommon man, under a liberal endowment, 
is likely to become common — ^in short, that the intellectual 
output of the individual in some way seems to be inversely 
as the square of his means. 

This principle does not affect the professor only, for if 
caution is not exercised our entire scholarship and fellowship 
systems may produce restdts the very reverse of those orig- 
inally intended. Fellowships have increased in number and 
in value until they have lost much of their stimulating effect. 
Instead of providing a scanty resource for the person who 
is absorbed in investigation, they are likely to become a 
gratuity to the academic mercenary. 

With full knowledge, then, of the deteriorating influence 
of idleness and of the debasing effect of charity, our ideal 
university will pick its men with greater caution, furnish 
them liberally with instruments for their work, increase their 
efficiency by eliminating, as far as possible, the distractions 
of university routine, approve of travel when it will bring 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 45 

workers in conference with other workers in their chosen 
field, and finally, above all, provide an environment that 
will compel the student, the professor and the investigator to 

" Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth 
of distance run." 

Work is the ideal 9,nd controlling factor in every form of 
physical and intellectual development. 

The afternoon exercises closed with the recessional, 

THE SON OF GOD GOES FORTH TO WAR 

The Son of God goes forth to war, 

A kingly crown to gain: 
His blood-red banner streams afar: 

Who follows in his train ? 
Who best can drink his cup of woe, 

Triumphant over pain; 
Who patient bears his cross below. 

He follows in His train. 

The martyr first, whose eagle eye 

Could pierce beyond the grave; 
Who saw his Master in the sky, 

And called on Him to save. 
Like Him, with pardon on His tongue, 

In midst of mortal pain. 
He prayed for them that did the wrong : 
Who follows in His train ? 

A glorious band, the chosen few, 

On whom the Spirit came: 
Twelve valiant saints, their hope they knew, 

And mocked the cross and flame. 
They met the tyrant's brandished steel. 

The lion's gory mane; 
They bowed their necks the death to feel: 

Who follows in their train ? 

A noble army : men and boys. 

The matron and the maid; 
Around the Saviour's throne rejoice. 

In robes of light arrayed. 
They climbed the steep ascent of heaven 

Through peril, toil, and pain: 
O God, to us may grace be given 

To follow in their train. 



46 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

With the singing of the hymn the academic procession 
marched slowly from the hall to the upper corridor and as 
they wended their way from the room they all joined in 
the singing, a most impressive feature. 

Following the conclusion of these exercises, Trustees, 
Alumni, and visitors inspected the buildings, being shown 
about by members of the Faculty and students of the Uni- 
versity and College. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 47 



BANQUET 

The banquet given to the Alumni by the Trustees was 
directly in line with the success attendant upon the other 
events of the day, there being not a single lagging moment 
during the three hours of feast; from the opening of the 
doors into the big dining hall of the Bancroft to the singing 
of "Auld Lang Syne" joy reigned supreme, and the recipro- 
cating spirit of friendship manifest at the tables and by the 
speakers made the event one to live long in the annals of 
Clark history. 

At 6.30 o'clock one hundred and fifty of the Alumni, 
Faculty and Trustees sat down to the following sumptuous 

repast : — 

MENU 

Cape Cod Oysters 

Olives Radishes Salted Nuts 

Garbure Bretonne 

Filet of Sole Duglere 

Vol au Vent of Sweetbread 

Broiled Squab Chicken au Cressons 

Potatoes Palestine 

French Peas 

Combination Salad 

Neapolitan Ice Cream 

Assorted Cake *"' 

Cafe 

At the conclusion of the banquet, the Toastmaster, Dr. 
French, called the assemblage to order, speaking very 
briefly, as follows: — 

You, loyal friends of Clark University, have participated 
to-day in a festival celebrating the passing of a quarter 
century in the life of this great University. 

This entire day, with its crowded events, has meant to 
us all more than words can express, for it is we, in part, 
who furnish the test by which this institution is measured, 
and when we review the twenty-five years of splendid ser- 
vice which she has rendered to the uplift of mankind, a spirit 



48 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

akin to reverence sweeps over us and fills us with awe as we 
realize that we, individually and collectively, have in some 
way, be it small or large, played a part in the magnificence 
of this development. The splendid addresses of the after- 
noon bespeak for the University her true standards and it 
seems eminently fitting that we here assembled should bring 
to a close our formal sessions of the day by a series of testi- 
monies, pledging ourselves anew to the great cause so force- 
fully and vitally pleaded for to-day. 

To this end, then, let us follow the lines of the old fashioned 
experience meeting, which is characterized by few words 
from the leader and many responses from those about him. 

Following this Dr. French introduced in turn the following 
speakers 

Dr. Hall. 

I lately picked up a sketch of Calicot, called the last and 
greatest of the mediaeval court fools, a unique clown-philos- 
opher, ugly in form and feature almost to the point of deform- 
ity, but withal so droll that even strangers who met him on 
the street had to laugh. His entertainment consisted in 
coming on the stage with cap, bells and mace, and giving 
impromptu, witty repartee answers to any questions from 
anybody in the audience. One night a solemn-faced clergy- 
man arose and said, "Calicot, you are getting old and have 
jested your way merrily through this life, with no thought 
of death. My question is, suppose you were condemned to 
die and meet your God to-night, but could choose your own 
mode of exit; how would you prefer to die ? " Without a 
moment's hesitation he answered that as a result of long and 
serious thought upon just that question, he had decided that 
he would tell his executioners that he wished to be tickled 
to death. If that is the end that fate has in store for me 
or for my older colleagues, we ought to feel " Nearer the 
bound of life. Where we lay our burdens down;" than we 
ever were before, as the old hymn has it. And so what do 
we care for this bad weather. Does not the good old Stein 
Song, which we ought to sing to-night, say " It's always 
fair weather when good fellows get together." 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 49 

Seriously, we have been, at least I, and I fancy my col- 
leagues, have been so busy that we had almost forgotten 
that things had been going on here so long. Doctors French 
and Ferry, however, are expert mathematicians, and they 
must be right in their calctilation that it is really twenty-five 
years, although as I look back it seems almost as foreshort- 
ened as if we were in Bergson's duree reelle or in the eternal 
absolute now, which is like God, the same yesterday, to-day 
and forever, although I do not quite understand what he 
means. Well, I have begun to study senescence, which I 
see already is to be far more fascinating than adolescence 
ever was. Dr. Wiley, of pure-food fame, who married a 
very few years ago at, I think, nearly my age, and the oldest 
of whose two babies has just won a eugenic prize, made an 
earnest plea here two years ago that the older men were, the 
wiser, better and more worth while they were, provided only 
that senile involution had not set in, and added that the 
surest sign of this latter was that illusion so prone to come 
over men as they grow old, that their places could not be 
at any time just as well or better filled by others. May I 
be saved that fatuity ! If men are only as old as they feel, 
how can anybody ever grow old at Clark ? It ought to be a 
kind of fountain of perpetual youth, about the best place 
in the world to grow old in. 

Two of the chief worries that age college presidents we 
have been spared. One is, we do not have to have dollars 
and students supremely in mind in everything we do or 
say. Only once have I approached a rich man upon the 
subject, talking as Heine said of his interview with the 
Rothschilds, "familHonairely" with him. He remarked at 
the outset that he had had more presidents of educational 
institutions than usual call upon him that day, and asked 
me to state our claims as briefly as I could. After I had 
done so, he remarked that he had been greatly struck in 
such interviews and in reports, catalogues, etc., that all 
evils and defects in every institution had very lately been 
entirely abolished in name, and he supposed that they con- 
tinued to exist merely in reality. As I left, bare-handed as 
I came, he remarked that he felt very kindly towards Clark. 



50 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

This was some twenty years ago, and ever since his kindness 
has been most unremitting. Again, one's lot here is happy 
in that we do not have to discipHne or expel students. The 
very nearest I ever came to this was years ago when a grad- 
uate student who had been here several years, working hard 
but making almost no progress, called one spring in some 
discouragement, to ask me if I thought he could ever make 
his doctorate. I asked him if his family was long-lived, and 
he told me cheerily the ages to which his parents, aunts, 
uncles, and the rest had lived or died. At the end of the 
next year he called again and told me that he had realized 
during the year what I meant by asking about the longevity 
of his folks, and said that he thought he had better resign, 
and I had to say that we should be resigned if he did so. 
Like all slow people, he could not really work. He had 
aspiration without the perspiration that ought to go with it. 
One of my students this year is preparing to tell the world, 
in a doctor's thesis, that there are three kinds of immortality, 
first, the good, old-fashioned kind of a better eternal life in 
a higher world or elsewhere; second, the biological immor- 
tality of the deathless germ plasm, that perpetuates parents 
and makes them live on in their offspring to the end of time; 
and third, the immortality of influence or the impressions 
they make upon those around who survive them. If you 
summon me to-night to make a Calicot-choice between these 
three and I could have but one, I believe I would prefer the 
last. Perhaps teachers devoted to their calling would gen- 
erally prefer to survive in the hearts, minds and lives of 
those they teach. Fichte did, who influenced the academic 
youth of his day perhaps more than anyone since Socrates, 
and his monument near Berlin bears the inscription, "Good 
teachers shall shine as the firmament, and they that lead 
youth to truth like the stars forever and ever." Plato wished 
to spend eternity teaching and learning, and Lotze said that 
the kind of heaven he wanted was a kind of seminary, dis- 
cussing the highest themes dialectically, face to face, now as 
himself a pupil of the great dead Aristotle, Dante, Kant and 
the rest (even though it be in some rude boat-house on the 
Styx), and now impregnating the souls of elite youth with 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 51 

the passion for the good, the beautiful and the true to which 
his Ufe and works were devoted. 

The happiest experience of my life is when in a letter or 
on a trip I meet an old student who grasps my hand, liter- 
ally or metaphorically, and says, " You taught me new and 
vital things that have stood by me and given me the impulse 
to go further," or when students in other departments send 
by me the same word to my colleagues, as Story, Webster, 
Sanford, Burnham, Wilson, and the rest, and perhaps say, 
" Tell them they woke me up, put me on my feet and set 
me going." That is our ideal and I think it is our specialty, 
possibly only because our little group is so small that per- 
sonal relations are unique and close here. Often is it the 
individual interviews, which I rather think are our specialty, 
and that in those who come back often stand out in retro- 
spect even more than do our lectures, or it may be confer- 
ences in the laboratory, journal club, library, or help on 
theses. Such spontaneous and ingenuous gratitude, touched 
by no lively sense of favors to come, or if it is written, coming 
without a request for a recommendation to a better place, 
is what does the teacher's heart good and keeps it warm, 
strong and growing. 

And do we not reciprocate all such feelings ? For my- 
self, I can truly say that although I have had many great 
teachers, I have learned far more from my students than 
from them. Nay, more, I want to say here, frankly and 
publicly, that much, if not the very best of my own books, 
are compilations, always with due acknowledgments, of my 
students' work, which they did here and since. While I did 
my best for them, they did more yet for me, and I want 
Mr. Wilson to say that in his booklet if it ever comes to 
another edition, and if he has not already done so, for either 
my self -consciousness or my appalling sensus temporis acti has 
not yet made it possible for me to read it. Perhaps this is, 
too, why I habitually remember my past students more by 
their thesis subjects than by their names, and think of the 
Rhythm monograph before I do of T. L. Bolton, its author, 
that of Touch before Krohn, Hydro-psychoses before F. E. 
Bolton, the Monkey study before Kinnaman, Creeping 



52 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

before Trettien, the Dendro-psychoses before Quantz, Mental 
Healing before Goddard, and so on. And so I shall remember 
the work on number teaching better than I do McDougle, 
the psychology of immortality longer than Ellis, the child 
welfare study than Dealey, etc. In my talk with poor Cham- 
berlain, the other day, he spoke with the greatest enthusiasm 
of the Van Waters study of adolescence among savage girls, 
and of Gilbertson's Eskimo thesis here. Chamberlain is the 
only man who came as a student, took his degree here, and 
has advanced to the full professorship. Shall we not send 
him from this table a hearty message of greeting and good 
cheer ? 

You are our children, and those you teach are our grand- 
children. Send them back to the old home when you have 
done your best for them, for from this point on we shall 
depend more and more on you for this service, which is the 
very best you can render us, better even than contributions 
to the new fellowships fund. 

Among the several hundred Clark men who are not here, 
so widely scattered are our graduates, one writes me from 
the Pacific Coast that the attraction he feels here is some- 
what inversely as the square of the distance, or like rubber, 
the further it is stretched the greater the tension. And so 
I think we should take great satisfaction in the good will, 
even though unspoken, which the great majority of our grad- 
uates, far off, some of them, in the most distant lands, are 
feeling for us to-day. But finally, for us the new theory of 
meetings like this is that where many gather and are warmed 
and enthused by the same spirit, the personality of each is 
re-enforced and its elements, always tending to break up, 
are cemented. The tie that binds individuals on occasions 
like this symbolizes a high unity of the manifold elements 
of the individual soul, brings a better synthesis of all its 
manifold components which in our day, as never before, is 
always threatened with disintegration. 

It is an old toast that the bonds of friendship tighten when 
they are wet. We cannot drink together, but Clark men do 
not need to do so to arouse enthusiasm. Plato said sentiment 
is the inebriation of the soul and makes it moist. In Kaul- 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 53 

bach's famous cartoon, the warriors fight on the same, whether 
dead or aHve, their spirits just overhead continuing the same 
battle and chanting their impavidi progrediamur. I want 
before I take my seat to propose as my toast " The next 
quarter of a century; may it be far better even than the 
past ! " But instead of this shall we not do better to stand 
and repeat together the " Vivat, crescat, floreat," cabled us 
by the University of Berlin the day we opened, thus inaugu- 
rating a custom to be repeated here every quarter of a cen- 
tury by all who can come back, whether from distant states 
or from beyond the bourn ? All together, Clark University, 
" Vivat, crescat, floreat ! " 

The diners all rose and gave this shout with a will. 

Dr. Story, 

Whenever I meet former students of the University I 
am pretty certain to hear something said about "the Clark 
spirit." I have tried to analyze this spirit, to determine of 
what it consists, and I have succeeded to my own satisfac- 
tion, at least. Like many phenomena, the Clark spirit has 
two elements, a positive element and a negative element, 
or, — if you please, — an active principle and a passive prin- 
ciple. The positive element is "independence of thought" 
and the negative element is "freedom from prejudice." And, 
it seems to me, the acquisition of this spirit is, or ought to 
be, the aim of a liberal education. Moreover, I believe this 
is also the essential thing in research. It is not so much 
the results obtained that is of importance in research, as the 
spirit in which the work is done. We often use the results 
of other's investigations, of course, but we should not be 
slavishly controlled by their theories and their opinions. We 
should think for ourselves and form our own opinions, based 
on the best evidence at our command, but we should also 
be tolerant of the opinions of others. May this always be 
"the Clark spirit." 

Col. a. G. Bullock. 

This occasion reminds me of a similar one, three or four 
years ago, when I had the privilege of attending, on Foun- 



54 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

der's Day, a meeting of the Alumni of Clark University. 
At that meeting the chairman, Mr. Bumpus, who delighted 
with his fine address this afternoon, presented to President 
Hall, from the Alumni, a beautiful loving cup. He read a 
great many letters from men who could not attend and, 
placing them inside the cup, he said to Dr. Hall, "the cup 
is silver but its contents are gold." And indeed they were. 
They came from men all over the country, who expressed 
in glowing terms their appreciation of the privileges they 
had enjoyed here, and of the inspiration they had received 
from Dr. Hall and his associates. 

I have attended other similar gatherings, but at none of 
them have I heard such genuine attestation of admiration 
and affection . Twenty-five years is not a long time in the 
life of a university, but if in the first twenty-five years of 
its existence it has placed to its credit such a record of ac- 
complishment as has Clark, it has amply justified its estab- 
lishment and given pledge for the future. During these 
twenty-five years some hundreds of men who have received 
our degrees have distinguished themselves in many fields of 
learning and science. During these years men of eminence 
from all over the world have visited us, have taken part 
in our exercises, and have been honored by our degrees. 

In these so-called progressive days, when in many things 
we seem to me to be progressing backward, it is a comfort 
to feel that our institutions of learning are gaining ground 
and constantly enlarging their field of usefulness. 

Ten years ago Clark opened the Collegiate Department for 
popular education, and the result has been in every way 
satisfactory. 

I think the only limitation that can be placed on our 
continued progression is that marked by the limitation of 
our resources, and I cannot doubt that in progress of time 
these will be increased. If there is any institution of the 
kind that deserves the support of Worcester it is Clark 
Our city is an important educational center, as it is of busi- 
ness and commerce. It is the duty of intelligent citizens to 
remember that the day of intellectual leadership never goes 
by. All these influences for a more widely diffused intel- 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 55 

lectual life, all these plans and methods for a more extended 
education are guarantees of a higher standard of living and 
citizenship. In this broad field of service Clark University- 
is doing its part and counts on the loyal support and devo- 
tion of its Alumni and friends. 

Dr. C. H. Thurber. 

I have been at some pains to look up the proper conduct 
for an alumnus Trustee, as there is no precedent for him to 
follow at Clark, and I find that he is supposed, on all suitable 
occasions, to render a report of his work on the Board to the 
Alumni. This is a very good time for me to report for I 
can make a report that I am sure will be satisfactory to all 
and prove that I have been attending faithfully to my duties. 

I have to report, first, that I have attended every meet- 
ing of the Board since my election; second, that every meas- 
ure I have favored has been adopted by the Board; third, 
that every measure I have opposed has been rejected by the 
Board. That is a record to be proud of, and one which has 
probably not been equalled by any other member, and cer- 
tainly has never been surpassed. As Clark University is a 
place for scientific research, to forestall what may happen 
if some person with one of those petty investigating minds 
that isn't satisfied without the whole truth gets on my trail, 
I will now add that there has been but one meeting of the 
Board since I became a member, and with the modesty 
becoming a youngster I naturally waited to see how the 
others were going to vote and then made it unanimous. I 
already see one clear line of service opening up before me. 
As I walked into the Board meeting a few minutes late, some 
one cried, "Oh, now we have a quonmi." " It is a pleasure, 
gentlemen," said I, "to be immediately of some real ser- 
vice." " Well," said our honored chairman, "we rather 
thought we could count on you to make a quorum when we 
elected you." Some people may cavil and say it's no great 
matter just to make a quorum; but I tell you, ladies and 
gentlemen, a quorum is absolutely indispensable to the 
future life and prosperity of Clark University, and I shall 
proudly make a quortmi whenever the opportunity arises. 



56 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

This afternoon Dr. Bumpus said a good thing that seemed 
meant for me. It was, substantially, that to serve as trustee 
of an American university was an honor any man might 
covet. To be a trustee of Clark University is an honor that 
I, certainly, deeply appreciate. But Dr. Bumpus said fur- 
ther that any man who accepted a position on the board of 
trustees of an American university because of the honor it 
conferred, and not for the opportunity for service it pre- 
sented was utterly unworthy and unfit. That, I believe, is 
absolutely true. He also said something which I shall trans- 
late into the vernacular as being "long on promises and short 
on performance." I do not intend to be long on promises. 
I deeply appreciate the honor of being a trustee of Clark 
University, but I should never have accepted the honor had 
I not had more regard for the opportunity for service thereby 
opened. I make this promise, and this only, to serve the 
University as opportunity comes, to the best of my ability, 
and the highest reward to which I aspire is the knowledge 
that in some small way my service has been of help to Clark 
University. 

Dr. E. C. Sanford. 

Dr. Hall, in his address this afternoon, asked that some 
one should bring forward an appropriate symbol for the 
joint institution and I have one which I should like to offer. 
It is suggested by the experience of a very near-sighted man 
who went to see a bicycle race. While the spectators were 
waiting for the races to begin a couple of men were warming 
up by speeding around the oval on a tandem. After they had 
ridden round several times, the near-sighted man exclaimed 
to his companion: " By Jove, this is the closest race I ever 
saw. Those fellows have been round the track half a dozen 
times and neither has gained an inch on the other ! " I 
propose two men on a tandem as the proper symbol of the 
College and the University — separate in management but 
both working with all their might upon the same machine. 

The College had the great good fortune to grow up under 
the shadow of the University and has not ceased to reap ad- 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 57 

vantage from the connection. Let me give you some indica- 
tion of how close that connection has been and still is. At 
the opening of the College the departments of Mathematics, 
Physics, Biology, and Psychology were organized by the 
heads of the corresponding departments in the University 
and the three departments of Mathematics, Physics, and 
Psychology have been from the first and throughout manned 
by men who had done their graduate work in the University, 
and the same has been only slightly less true of Biology. 
Five of the twenty-five men now constituting the regular 
College Faculty are Ph. D.'s of the University or have taken 
work for the doctorate in it and one or two more are now 
assisting in the work of the College. One-half of the regular 
Faculty of the University have been or are now connected 
with the Faculty of the College, and three men of the College 
Faculty offer courses on the University side. 

The problems of the College are different from those of 
the University, of course, but it has been guided in the solu- 
tion of them by the same sincerity of purpose and the same 
loyalty to the highest standards which have guided the 
University in its prosecution of research. The College has 
succeeded in creating for its students an atmosphere in which 
scholarship flourishes and a genuine interest in the intel- 
lectual life. I have no statistics for other institutions but I 
feel confident that the record of Clark College is by no means 
a common one in the proportion of its graduates who go on 
into graduate study for the non-professional degrees. Not 
counting those who have gone into medicine, the law, and 
theology, a full fifth of the College's three hundred and eleven 
A. B.'s have entered graduate institutions. More than fifty 
of them have taken the master's degree in Clark University. 

Looking at the same facts from the University side I may 
say that two-fifths of all the master's degrees which have 
been conferred by the University upon men since there were 
graduates of the College to take the degree (I leave ladies 
out of account for at this point the College cannot compete) 
— two-fifths have been conferred upon Clark College men, 
and over one-tenth of all the doctor's degrees that have 



58 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

been conferred upon men, since there were College men 
advanced enough to be candidates for that degree, have been 
conferred on College A. B.'s 

There was one thing about Dr. Hall's historical references 
in his address this afternoon that struck me with especial 
force and that was the omission of any reference whatever 
to the greatest disappointment in the history of the Uni- 
versity — the diversion of the money which all those who 
loved the University had hoped would bring a realization 
of their dreams for it, to the foundation of a college. How 
great that disappointment was I know, for I was there. 
How that disappointment has been met you may judge from 
Dr. Hall's friendly words this afternoon and from the loyal 
co-operation of the University Faculty in getting the new 
institution under way. The situation was, nevertheless, a 
difficult one. There was doubt on both sides as to the future 
and fear on both sides that one foundation would grow at 
the expense of the other. There is a certain Limerick which 
runs: 

" There was a young lady of Niger 

Who went to ride on a tiger, 
They returned from the ride 
With the lady inside, 

And a smile on the face of the tiger." 

We had then a new problem of The Lady and The Tiger, 
not quite like Frank Stockton's, but to all appearances as 
pestering, Which of the two institutions was to prove the 
lady and which the tiger ? Some perhaps have the last 
vanishing shadow of such a fear yet. If there are any such 
here, I want to tell them that their fears are groundless. 
There is not the slightest danger that either will swallow 
the other. There are many obscurities in Mr. Clark's will, 
but of one thing there cannot be the faintest possible doubt 
and that is that it was his desire and intention that all the 
parts of his foundation should be maintained in equal and 
equally efficient operation. The College and the University 
are parts of a single organism and what hurts one hurts the 
other. The time has come when it should be recognized that 
the College man who indulges in unfriendly criticism of the 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 59 

University is disloyal to the College and the University man 
who indulges in similar criticism of the College is disloyal 
to the University. The time has come when those who 
think of the College and the University, and especially those 
who think for the future, should think of them as a joint 
institution — under separate management but integral parts 
of a single whole. 

I venture to hope even that time will show that the founding 
of the College was not, after all, even a financial disadvantage 
to the University. The University Alumni are scholars and 
men of research. It is not necessary for them to take the 
vows of poverty: they will have poverty thrust upon them. 
It is not likely that there will be millionaires among them, 
and though their loyalty may never be so zealous it is hardly 
to be expected that many of them will ever have the money 
for great endowments. With the College it is not altogether 
so. Many of its Alumni go into scholarship and research, 
but more do not. The College has and always will have 
Alumni who are business men and professional men in the 
better paid professions. I hope there may be millionaires 
among them — generous millionaires, not only able but wil- 
ling to give to the joint institution the money which it 
so much needs for further development. The money which 
went to the founding of the College would then appear not 
as lost but as invested in friends of means, a most valuable 
resource for any institution. In this way the University 
may yet receive more even in money than it missed through 
the founding of the College. 

And finally I want to say a word or two about Dr. Hall; 
no speech at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the University 
could be made and leave Dr. Hall out. There have been 
some suspicious souls who have thought they saw in Dr. 
Hall the arch-enemy of the College. Because he was not 
openly hostile they have suspected him of being an adroit 
schemer bent on mischief through guile, one who would 
out-Machiavelli Machiavelli. Well, that is all moonshine; 
Dr. Hall is the best friend the College has. 

It would have been easy at any time for Dr. Hall to have 
made the position of the President of the College extremely 



60 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

disagreeable and difficult. So far as I have had any experi- 
ence his course has been exactly the reverse of that. It would 
have been easy and indeed natural for him, as the elder and 
more experienced educator, to lay down the law on matters 
of College administration. He has not done so, but on the 
contrary, when he has in rare instances made suggestions 
he has done so with the greatest courtesy, with hesitation, 
I might almost say with diffidence. I myself have trespassed 
a few times on University affairs ; five years have not weaned 
me of interest in what concerns the University; but Dr. 
Hall has never trespassed upon College affairs. I wish again 
to present Dr. Hall, with all the force and emphasis that I 
can muster, as the best friend the College has. 

Dr. Webster. 

It is now past nine o'clock, and as our reception was 
announced to begin at that hour, it will be necessary for me 
to talk backwards for five minutes in order to bring the clock 
back to that point. I suppose that I am called upon as one 
of the younger members of the university, since I, unlike the 
speakers who have preceded me, have been here only twenty- 
four years. It is very difficult for me to realize that so much 
water has gone through the mill, for I remember perfectly the 
day on which I first saw the university, and the rather un- 
pleasant shock I had as I stepped off the horse-car in response 
to the direction of the conductor. The grounds were then 
surrounded by a simple picket fence, the yard was grown up 
to tall grass, and the now familiar architecture of the main 
building, which with the laboratory building, was all there 
was on the lot, did not arouse my enthusiasm. I was on my 
way to see the president of a Massachusetts college where I 
had had an offer, but the apparently great opportunities for 
scientific work here captured me, and have held me until now. 

I was then just home from four years in Europe, probably 
the best four years of my life, full of enthusiasm and admiration 
for the splendid achievements of European science, and be- 
lieving, as I still believe, that there is no pursuit more full of 
joy, and more productive of service to humanity, than that 
of the quest of nature's secrets, unfettered by the matter of 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 61 

personal gain or advantage. Coming here I was at once 
encouraged to do my best, and was thus saved from that cold 
bath to enthusiasm that the dreary driving of unwilling 
pupils frequently is to the aspiring scholar. After two years 
of association with Professor Michelson, now the first of Amer- 
ican physicists, I was allowed to shoulder the responsibility 
for the conduct of the department, and soon realized what a 
man's job that was. Well do I remember the lean years that 
Dr. Hall described this morning when we all learned to tighten 
the belt, and to practise the most strenuous of scientific 
management, long before it was known by that name. We did 
not have to fill out schedules of hours, to punch time clocks, 
to make card catalogues of our thoughts, nor do any of those 
idiotic things that geniuses for accountancy, for hustle and 
grind, have since invented, and by which some have sought 
to relate academic achievement to the product of the factory 
and the machine shop. All that was expected of us was that 
every man should do his best, and that we tried to do. All of 
us were young and vigorous, and inspired by the same ideals. 
We had a living wage, and it was always, even in the hardest 
times, paid promptly. We learned how to do without, but 
for myself I can truly say that those were happy years, and 
I do not regret them. Sweet are the uses of adversity. In 
the years since then, many of our American universities have 
built great laboratories for physics, several of which, costing 
more than a quarter of a million dollars apiece have seemed to 
speak the last word of luxury and convenience for the experi- 
menter, but I believe they do not teach the most important 
lesson, that it is men rather than apparatus or buildings that 
make progress, and that some of the greatest discoveries 
have been made with the simplest of apparatus, but by men 
of genius. 

In the time allotted to me I cannot speak as I would of 
the scientific career. I have elsewhere expressed myself 
upon this subject in print, but will you allow me once more to 
express my conviction that there is nothing more inspiring, 
nothing more satisfying, in the whole catalogue of professions. 
The greatest men whom I have ever known, Helmholtz, Lord 
Kelvin and Lord Raleigh, men whose names have been for 



62 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

me as those of gods, have been men whose character is as a 
shining Hght, shining into the more perfect day; and I count 
it the greatest of my possessions to have been allowed to, in 
a humble degree, count myself as one of their associates. In 
the lecture theater of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris is a 
patriotic decoration, surrounded by those distinguished names 
that have made French science illustrious, and surmounted 
by the inscription, " Pour la Gloire, la Science, et la Patrie," 
and although our glory is not that of marching battalions, 
nor blazoned in the headlines of the press, is it any less real, 
and is our social service less ? Such I take to be the spirit of 
Clark University. 

Dr. W. H. Burnham. 

The toastmaster has charged me with looking serious. I 
am serious, and while I am well aware that an after-dinner 
speech, even on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the University 
is not the proper occasion for discussing grave matters, you 
will, I trust, pardon an element of seriousness in what I have 
to say. I wish to speak of some of the needs of the University. 

First, a clearer insight into the aims and methods of the 
University is desirable. Many citizens in Worcester, I am 
told, do not know what we are doing; and a clearer idea of 
what we are attempting would be desirable among the stu- 
dents themselves. In the past there has been a certain amount 
of confusion and misunderstanding. A few years ago, for 
example, something like this might happen. A new student 
came to the University, enrolled at the office, received the 
University Register, and perhaps by the time he reached 
the University Library he had recalled enough of his college 
Latin to translate the University motto. Fiat Lux. He 
went in, hung up his coat and saw the sign " Put out the 
Light." Next, perhaps, he went to hear one of the brilliant 
opening lectures by President Hall. After the lecture he 
went out thinking about the great man to whom he had 
listened, strolled over to the biological laboratory, and there 
he found that after all Hodge had more brains than any 
other member of the Faculty. 

All this was somewhat confusing to the student, but he 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 63 

was Still more confused when he first consulted with his 
instructor in regard to a problem for research. The student 
knows how to study an ordinary subject; but the idea of 
studying something about which nobody knows anything 
is new to him. His instructor gives him a problem which 
promises to give opportunity for original work. The stu- 
dent goes out, thinks it over, tries to read in regard to it, 
and comes back in a few days somewhat confused. His 
feehng is much like that of a friend of mine who took her 
first ride in an automobile. She hired a taxicab, and as soon 
as she got into the machine it started with a jerk, barely 
grazed a lamp post, and went at a violent rate of speed down 
the street. She leaned out and said to the chauffeur: 

" Please be careful, this is the first time I ever rode in an 
automobile." 

" Oh, madam," said the chauffeur, "don't let that worry 
you, this is the first time I ever drove one." 

The student comes back to his instructor and says, 

" I can't find out anything about this subject, and I don't 
know anything about it either." 

" Oh, don't let that trouble you." the instructor replies, 
" I don't know anything about it either." 

That is the proper answer to give, but it is somewhat 
confusing to the student. 

Second, a better trained class of new students would be 
desirable. We have an admirable group of workers, but 
they might be better trained when they come to us. The 
average student, as I see him, is trjdng very hard to get 
ahead, — and that, believe me, is the one thing that more 
than anything else he needs. 

Perhaps I can make that point clearer to some of those 
in the back part of the room by an illustration. In the study 
of hygiene we find that whenever disease attacks an indi- 
vidual it always goes to the weakest spot. That is the reason 
I suppose that in most universities so many of the students 
suffer from colds in the head.^ 



^The reader will please note that this statement _ was very carefully 
made with reference to students in "most universities," not to those 
in Clark University. According to my observation cases have been 
more frequent here among the members of the Faculty. 



64 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

Third, it would be desirable to have more attention given 
to the study of educational movements in this country. We 
have given much attention to German education and the 
results of scientific investigations in that country. This is 
indispensable; but it would be desirable to study also Amer- 
ican education more thoroughly. 

The importance of this is suggested by a recent incident 
in my own experience. As some of you know, I have main- 
tained that the method of suggestion is better than the 
method of demonstration; and I have myself sometimes 
used the method of suggestion with more or less success. 
Two years ago, for example, in the course on the Hygiene 
of the School Child, I lectured on mumps; and after about 
ten days one of my best students fell ill with the mumps. 
There was nothing strange about that. But later in the 
course I lectured on measles. I spoke of the German studies 
of this disease and of the remarkable experiments made by 
Eberstaller in German schools. After a week or two, again 
one of my best students came down with the measles; but 
after a few days I found, to my chagrin, that after all it 
was only the German measles. 

It is vitally important to study the results of German 
scientific investigation; for the German scholar, as Heine, 
I believe, said, "dives down deeper, and stays down longer, 
and comes up muddier, than any other scholar in the world;" 
but it is desirable to study also the results of American 
investigators. 

These are really serious matters. First of all, it is desir- 
able that there should be a clearer insight into the aims 
and methods of the University, especially among the new stu- 
dents. The Facility can do very much to bring this about. 
Second, it is desirable that we should have a better trained 
class of new students. The Alumni can do much to furnish 
us with better raw material by calling the attention of prom- 
ising students to the opportunities offered by Clark Univers- 
ity. Third, it is desirable that more attention should be given 
to educational movements in this country; and it may be 
hoped that sometime in the not distant future some wealthy 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 65 

alumnus may see fit to found a fellowship or a professorship 
for the study of American education. 

Dr. F. C. Ferry. 

About a half dozen years ago a new physician settled in 
Williamstown. There were a half dozen physicians in the 
little village already, but this man had lived in Williamstown 
through part of his boyhood, and had graduated from the 
college. He is a most likable man and a very successftd 
practitioner. Accordingly his practice has now become so 
large that he has associated with himself a younger physician 
who shares his office and his calls. One of our students 
recently entered this joint office with his face bandaged and 
complained to the older man that the bandage had not been 
put on properly. On being asked if the older physician had 
himself applied the bandage, the student replied, " No, 
you didn't do it yourself, it was done by your accomplice." 
I happily believed, Mr. Toastmaster, that I had been enough 
your accomplice in the preparation of the list of speakers 
for the evening so that I would be excused from this task. 
I am disappointed, and that even more for your sakes than 
for my own. 

One of my associates travelled in Greece a year since and 
met there many of the American Greeks who had come back 
home to bear arms for their native country. He found these 
men, and particularly the younger ones, very interesting 
fellows. He tells me of one, twenty years of age, who had 
been employed in Boston for eight years and had found 
that modern Athens a place of great financial opportunity 
and now become very dear to him. He explained that he 
was going to return to Boston just as soon as circumstances 
would permit and would stay there forever, if he could. 
Some one asking the time as they talked, the young Greek 
took out his watch and waited to perform a bit of addition 
before he named the hour. My friend asked him why his 
watch was so very slow and the Greek youth replied: " My 
watch keeps Boston time. It has kept Boston time ever 
since I left Boston and it will be keeping Boston time when 



66 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

I go back to my American home." We Clark Alumni all 
claim some other institution as the birthplace of our intel- 
lectual life; but in good time a kindly fortune brought us 
here and we found this University a place of the very great- 
est intellectual opportunity and it became most dear to us. 
Fortunate are we if in all our wanderings we still keep Clark 
University time, — ^if our scholarly imptilses still move in the 
kindly, accurate, faithful, and successful spirit which you, 
our most helpful teachers, taught us here. We are grateful 
to the Trustees of the University for contributing so gener- 
ously to make this opportunity for us to return, to meet our 
teachers again, and to correct our watches by the Clark time. 
Most of us Alumni feel quite helpless to return what we 
received here from this gracious alma mater. We are mainly 
teachers and, when we look for money to contribute, find 
only debts. While our creditors would be glad to have us 
give these to the University, this would avail not. But, 
perhaps there is another kind of service which we can render. 
Clark University must have the ablest of our college grad- 
uates for her students if she is to continue to maintain her 
former rank among institutions of learning. These ablest 
college graduates are more and more sought by other uni- 
versities which offer fellowships of great stipend and clois- 
tered palaces in stone to attract them. Each year shows 
new sources of attraction and still larger fellowships. With 
her modest endowment she can hardly compete on financial 
grounds. Accordingly the Alumni who can persuade desir- 
able students to come to Clark will serve their alma mater 
well and will serve still better, if their experience prove 
like ours, the young men themselves whose steps we turn 
Clark ward. 

Professor Earl Barnes. 

Twenty-four years ago the National Education Associa- 
tion met in Toronto, Canada. One afternoon a notice was 
posted, that after the close of the session, G. Stanley Hall 
would meet those interested in a room of the Normal School 
to discuss child study. There I made my acquaintance 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 67 

with the gentleman who spoke this afternoon as the presi- 
dent of Clark University, celebrating the twenty-fifth anni- 
versary of the institution. 

From that day to this I have been a frequent visitor at 
Clark, coming here for ideas and inspiration, and in the in- 
tervals between visits I have quarried out sections of the 
Pedagogical Seminary, the American Journal of Psychology, 
and the big voltimes on Adolescence, and have sold them here 
and there as my original contribution to pedagogy. All 
this would explain my feeling at home in Clark University, 
and yet I am surprised to see how I received your invitation 
to attend this meeting almost as a matter of course, how I 
fell in line with your graduates and listened to the addresses 
with the feeling that they were intended for me. 

One of President Hall's remarks cleared the whole matter. 
He said, "Clark University is not a structtire, it is a state 
of mind." I had accepted the state of mind, and so I had 
become a part of Clark University. Later we heard a great 
deal about original research and the true scientific spirit, 
and yet in some way that failed to entirely explain the state 
of mind that is Clark University. After all, a state of mind 
must be created by individuals. It does not merely happen. 

A year ago, in a western city, I was introduced to a school- 
man, and we began talking of common interests and ac- 
quaintances. The man seemed little interested in me until 
I happened to mention the name of Louis N. Wilson. In- 
stantly his whole attitude changed. " Do you know Wil- 
son ? " he exclaimed, "come and have dinner with me, and 
we will talk about him." Every old student of Clark Uni- 
veristy has time and again run across this state of mind 
which is Clark University, and has found that it responded 
to the name of Louis N. Wilson. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I toast you the gentle lover of 
Pepy's diary, the connoisseur of fine book-binding, the in- 
defatigable servitor of all who need him and of all who 
merely think they need him, the man who is a friend in 
times of good fortune, doubly a friend in times of adversity, 
unfailingly and for ever a friend in times of disaster, — ladies 



68 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

and gentlemen, I toast you Dr. Louis N. Wilson, one of the 
most important factors in creating the state of mind that is 
Clark University. 

Dr. Louis N. Wilson.* 

It hardly seems possible that twenty-five years have 
slipped by since I first became connected with Clark Uni- 
versity. I remember with what fear and trepidation I en- 
tered upon my duties. We were a very small band, but 
I was taken into the family very early in my connection 
with the institution. It was a brilliant group of men that 
Dr. Hall had gathered together and it was a liberal educa- 
tion to be associated with them. I do not wish to imply 
that the old days were better than the present, as that is 
said to be an old man's cry, and while I realize the years 
are passing I do not wish to hasten them. But it seems to 
me that the men in those days, both professors and students, 
were a little more earnest, a little more concentrated upon 
their work, than is the student of to-day. I suppose it was 
partly due to the fact that they were a picked lot of men, 
men who had been waiting for just such an opportunity as 
Clark University, for the first time, afforded them. At any 
rate, in those days we heard much less about social service 
or about our duties to the public, and every man seemed to 
be living solely for science. I do not object to a student 
taking in music or the theatre, but I must confess that I 
have a little bit more respect for a man who drops all 
these things for the three years of his student life at 
Clark and devotes himself absolutely to acquiring knowledge 
in his special line. In other words I like to see a man stick 
to his job. 

I know there is a great deal said just now about the service 
the University owes to the great public, but I am not afraid 
to rank myself on the other side. I think the greatest service 
a university can render to the public is to train good men, 
not in large numbers, to train them well and let them 

* Dr. Wilson was detained at home by illness. His remarks prepared 
for the occasion are here printed. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 69 

serve the public after they go out from the institution. There 
is grave danger that while the Professor is serving the public 
the student may be neglected. If an institution of learning 
desires to advertise itself before the public it would be much 
wiser, in my opinion, to have a special man for that purpose. 
I merely throw this out as a hint to you gentlemen who have 
gone out into the teaching world, and who will mould the char- 
acter of our higher institutions of education during the next 
twenty-five years. There has been a great deal of criticism of 
colleges and universities in the past few years. Whether just or 
unjust, I do not know. But in spite of all the popular clamor 
I still maintain that the function of a college or university 
is to give men an education and not merely to make them 
capable of earning their living. The university men must 
believe heart and soul in university ideals, and these ideals 
must be high if the university is to live and command respect. 
On the personal side, as I look back over these twenty- 
five years, I am filled with a deep sense of gratitude for the 
warm friendships I have made, for the splendid fellows I 
have known here, and for their continued friendship for me 
after they have gone out into active life. As I said just 
now the association with the first group of men was an 
education in itself, so I think the association with the stu- 
dents all through these twenty-five years has been a constant 
reminder to me that I have got far more from the University 
than it ever got from me. I can truly say with the psalmist 
that "my lines have fallen in pleasant places" and I find 
it absolutely impossible to attempt to convey to you the 
deep debt of gratitude I owe to you all. I have felt for the 
University all these years much as I imagine the children 
of Israel felt for the Temple of the Lord in the old testament 
days, that it was something sacred and dedicated to high 
purposes. Perhaps I have at times carried this sentiment 
to absurd lengths, yet I am glad I have felt and still retain 
it. To have served Clark University faithfully and well 
for a quarter of a century, and to have won and held the 
love and respect of the splendid men who have been con- 
nected with her all through those years, is indeed a great 



70 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

honor. I can only express the hope that I may show my 
appreciation of it all by yet greater devotion to the Uni- 
versity and her Alumni in the years yet to come. 

One of the features of the evening was the presentation 
of a purse of $350 to Dr. Wilson by the Alumni of the Uni- 
versity. 

The enthusiasm which greeted the sentiments expressed 
by Dr. Dawson in his speech of presentation showed the 
spontaneity of confirmation of the devotion of all for this 
great man. 

Dr. George E. Dawson. 

My part in the program of this occasion was primarily 
intended to be only that of a spokesman between the Alumni 
of Clark University, and our good friend, Dr. Louis N. 
Wilson. Now that he is absent, through sudden illness, I 
am placed in a rather anomalous, not to say embarrassing, 
position. It is hard to play a part in the drama of Hamlet 
with Hamlet off the stage. However, since you have called 
upon me, Mr. Chairman, I shall say briefly a few words 
that I have it in my heart to say, and then play my spokes- 
man r61e, with you as our friend Wilson's proxy. 

On all such occasions, much is apt to be said, directly or 
indirectly, about what Clark University stands for in the 
estimation of those who are called upon to speak. This 
evening has proved no exception to the rule. And while 
others have been talking, there has come to my mind, as 
always before, the mental image of Clark University as a 
group of friends, bound together by ties of intellectual com- 
radeship and mutual goodwill and helpfulness. Whatever 
else the Clark University of the old days may have meant, 
it certainly was the abode of men whose ideas, work, hopes, 
and often perplexities, were grounded upon the basis of that 
community of spirit which is the essence of friendship. 

I well remember my own introduction to the University. 
It centers in two men, Wilson, and President Hall. I can 
see them yet, both, as it happened often in those days, stand- 
ing within the railing of what was then the secretary's office. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 71 

Wilson was near the entrance, alert for greetings or business 
with any visitor; President Hall was standing near the 
window, reading a letter, or some manuscript. To Wilson 
I was introduced by a mutual friend. And then came the 
words "Glad to see you, my boy," and the friendly hand 
resting on my shoulder, which I afterwards came to know were 
greetings as genuine as was the nature of him who extended 
them. " What can I do for you ? Has your family come 
yet ? How about a house ? Now, remember, Dawson, if 
there is anything I can do to help you settle yourselves, I 
want you to let me know," — served further to complete the 
impression that I was at home, welcome in a family circle, 
no less than in an academic institution. 

But this was only the prelude to President Hall's part in 
my introductory experiences. He was just going over to 
his house. I must go along. He wanted to talk with me. 
What did I propose to study at Clark ? What had I studied ? 
What problems was I especially interested in ? He was very 
glad to have me at the University. Thus between questions 
and comments, I was made to feel that, possibly, I was just 
the man President Hall was looking for to do some big work 
hitherto undone, and now the fates were bringing the indi- 
vidual and the opportunity together in a rather unique 
way. I have never been able to decide just how far a certain 
shrewd himaor entered into President's Hall first interview 
with me, but I have never questioned the essential friendli- 
ness of it all; and when I left his residence with my arms 
full of pamphlets and magazine articles, some of them by 
President Hall, given to me outright to set my wits and 
imagination to work on the unsolved problems we had agreed 
I was destined to solve during my stay at Clark, — I had a 
distinctly new sense of how the scholarship of a man whom 
I had long revered as a scholar, may be swallowed up in the 
human sjrmpathy that makes the great and the small akin. 

The impressions thus made upon my mind by these two 
introductory experiences were everywhere strengthened 
through my further contact with the University. Every 
teacher, without exception, whatever his role as academic 
guide and counsellor, was a friend. The whole community 



72 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

of books, apparatus, ideas, lectures, recitations and what 
not, was primarily a community of sympathetic interest and 
co-operation. 

Now, I am inclined to think that it was out of memories 
inspired by some such experiences and impressions as my 
own, that Drs. Bohannon and Kline, of far-away Duluth, 
conceived the idea of making this anniversary occasion a 
medium for the expression of friendliness. What more fitting 
contribution to the program of such an occasion than a 
testimonial to the function of friendship in a university's 
life ? And what worthier recipient of such a testimonial 
cotdd be found than he who, among all the good friends 
of Clark University, has from the first day of its existence 
to the present moment, been chief in all the offices of friend- 
ship ? I am to tell you, then, Fellow Alumni and ladies and 
gentlemen, that, originating with Drs. Bohannon and Kline, 
of the State Normal School of Duluth, Minn., the plan was 
worked out among the Alumni of raising a purse, to be 
presented to Dr. Louis N. Wilson on this occasion. This 
plan had as one of its primary objects a possible visit by 
Dr. Wilson to the principal libraries of the West and North- 
west, and more particularly the libraries of educational 
centers. It was expressly understood, however, that this 
visit was only a suggestion, and that Dr. Wilson was to be 
left free to use the purse as he thought best. 

It is hardly necessary to state that this plan of raising a 
purse as a testimonial to Dr. Wilson, met with the most 
cordial and enthusiastic reception. From twenty-seven dif- 
ferent states, extending literally from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, 
former students of Clark University, and friends of Dr. 
Wilson, have sent in their contributions. I have to announce 
to you to-night that there has thus been raised a purse of 
$350.00. 

And now, Mr. Chairman, to you, as representing Dr. 
Wilson, I tender this purse, hoping that in the use of it you 
may receive as full a measure of joy and profit as we, your 
friends of the Alumni of Clark University, have had in pro- 
viding it for you. 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 73 

A large number of letters were received from alumni who 
were unable to be present, expressing sentiments of loyalty 
to Clark, to President Hall, to the various Professors and 
especially to Dr. Wilson about whom centers the affection of 
all Clark men. 

Dr. Chamberlain 1 wrote from his sick bed the following 
note, which was read to a company " sorrowing . . . that 
they should see his face no more." 

My Dear Mr. Wilson: 

You know better than anyone else how sorry I am 
that severe illness will prevent me participating in any 
of the anniversary exercises. And you know, too, what 
this means after twenty-four years continuous service 
to the University. Will you express for me my best 
wishes for the success of the occasion in every respect. 
May Clark University, under the leadership of President 
Hall, continue to be a tower of strength for the advance- 
ment and encouragement of the highest and noblest 
ideals of science. 

Very sincerely, 

Alexander F. Chamberlain. 

THE RECEPTION 

At nine o'clock the Trustees, Facility and Aliunni gave a 
reception in the ball-room of the Bancroft Hotel to the citizens 
of Worcester. In the receiving line were : 

Colonel and Mrs. A. G. Bullock. 

Doctor and Mrs. G. Stanley Hall. 

Doctor and Mrs. E. C. Sanford. 

Members of the College Faculty acted as ushers. Music 
was furnished by the Hotel orchestra and refreshments were 
served during the evening. 



^ Dr. Chamberlain's illness proved fatal April 8, 1914. 



74 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

THE MEDAL 

The Board of Trustees early in the year commissioned Mr 
Victor D. Breuner of New York to prepare a medal to mark 
the 25th anniversary. On the morning of Commencement 
Day after the conferring of degrees, Dr. Austin S. Garver, 
on behalf of the Board, presented the first example of the medal 
struck at the U. S. Mint, to President Hall in the following 
words : 

On this happy and auspicious anniversary, crowned with 
fulfillment, as we look back over the twenty-five years of 
completed history, we have abundant reasons for pride and 
mutual congratulation. Measured by true standards what a 
rare history it has been. In this brief period, under a wise 
leader, aided by learned and devoted colleagues, the University 
has grown from an empty name to an assured place among 
the foremost institutions of higher learning in the world. In 
a short quarter century it has won wide fame and secular 
prestige : and upon all connected with it there is reflected 
today the glory of an incomparable achievement. 

In view of this splendid record, and desiring to give fitting 
expression to their sense of its importance, the Trustees have 
caused a medal to be prepared in commemoration of an 
anniversary so significant and unique. 

On the one side is designed a beautiful allegorical group 
symbolizing the spirit of the University, itself on the high 
road of science, pressing forward to clearer light and fresh 
discovery, while guiding the steps of eager youth along the 
same arduous and upward path. The whole is interpreted 
by the lines from Cowper : — 

"Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much, 

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more." 

On the face of the medal is delineated the fine philosophic 
head of the real builder and maker of the University, the 
master mind that has charted its course, the vital spirit that 
breathed into it the breath of life. While on the ^edge, in 
bold characters, appears the name of the Founder in the 
inscription : 

"Clark University Twenty-fifth Anniversary, 1914." 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 75 

The medal has thus a twofold meaning, and purpose. On 
the one hand it commemorates an illustrious epoch in the 
history of the University; on the other hand it is a personal 
tribute to the genius of the President who has made it what 
it is. 

It is now my proud privilege, on behalf of the Trustees, to 
present to you, President Hall, this medal, which in addition 
to its merit as a work of art, and to the sentiments with which 
it is charged, has the further interest of being the first impres- 
sion from the mint. 

We present it to you in recognition of your wise and inspiring 
leadership; in acknowledgment of your distinguished service 
in the cause of education ; and especially in grateful and affec- 
tionate remembrance of your long association with us, and 
your unsparing devotion to the interests of the University. 

May I speak not for the Trustees only, but for all who have 
been associated with you, in bidding you to accept it as a 
token of our high appreciation,- and as a perpetual memorial 
both of the signal quality of the work you have done, and of 
the esteem and honor in which you are held by us all. We do 
not want to keep these testimonies from you while you are 
still with us, nor hold them in reserve till you have no ears 
to hear them. They come warm from our hearts, with the 
prayer that you may long continue to be the only President 
of Clark University. 

Asking the audience, which had arisen, to be seated, 
Dr. Hall said: 

Mr. Garver and gentlemen of the Board of Trustees: — 
I cannot feign to be taken by surprise by this most artistic 
memento of the quarter century which ends to-day, and since 
this item was put on the programme I have thought of or 
rather felt many things, all of them inadequate, that I would 
like to say, but the overwhelming terms of your presentation 
resolve every thought I had back into feelings that are so 
deep and strong that I can hardly think or speak at all. 
From the bottom of my heart I thank you, gentlemen of the 
Board. Whatever has been done here is in a very unusual 



76 CLARK UNIVERSITY 

sense your work, for all these years we have been standing 
close together, and no executive servant ever had wiser or 
kinder masters. I realize, as I glance over our history from 
the beginning to the present, the most unusual burdens that 
you and your distinguished predecessors have had to bear, 
and to what an extent the very existence as well as the achieve- 
ments of the university are your monument. Would that 
the Founder himself, who loved and lived for this institution 
as his only child, could see this day. The obverse of this 
medallion exactly embodies his ideal, wisdom guiding and 
inspiring youth on the upward way towards larger truth and 
more light. This is indeed the apt and pregnant symbol, not 
only of our achievements, but of all our aspirations. The 
taller figure stands for all who have investigated and taught, 
and the other represents all who have studied and learned 
here. Both are just leaving an obscurer and more unsettled 
background and starting up a smoother and flower-lined way, 
and both faces are turned from the past and are intent upon 
the future. That this conception, which the artist owes to 
Dr. Garver, may forever typify the Clark spirit, is my most 
fervent wish and prayer. 

The other face of the medal has only a temporary signifi- 
cance. I may perhaps say with due modesty that the folds of 
the drapery I am given seem to me a thing of beauty. As 
Mr. Brenner was putting into the life-size model, from which 
this was reduced, with a needle the hairs that have grown 
thin from the work of these twenty-five years, and with his 
thumb-nail the wrinkles that have increased, I wondered if 
two or three thousand years hence, when some future archae- 
ologist might excavate one of these medallions from our 
grounds, my features might not be so softened by time that 
he would interpret it not as an individual but as a composite 
portrait of the Faculty, for that is what it really stands for, 
because it is not I, but they, that have made Clark. May I 
therefore accept it not for myself but for you, my colleagues ? 
May I not accept it also for all the students who are and have 
been here, and for the college as well, for we are all parts of a 
larger whole and indeed, for all Faculties between whom and 
their Board of Trustees such ideal relations exist as have 



TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY 77 

always prevailed here ? It is indeed vastly easier as well as 
more blessed to give than to receive, and if I were giving 
this medallion to you, Mr. Garver, or to the Trustees, even I, 
instead of these halting and inadequate words, feel as if even 
I for once might be almost eloquent. Since our celebration 
of March 28th, we have thought much of the past. Let us 
now, one and all, turn to the future and regard this moment 
as the commencement indeed of the next quarter century, 
and with more perfect unity and greater loyalty let all who 
care for Clark try to make the next twenty-five years so bright 
that they will eclipse the past. 



A few copies of the medal remain for distribution. For price address 
Dr. Louis N. Wilson, Librarian. 



m!;,!,?^'^^^ of congress 



029 923 109 4 



